Zink Lands A Simple Fix To Boost Doom Performance By ~10x

For fans of the Doom (2016) video game looking to enjoy the title with the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, a simple fix showed how addressing a simple oversight can boost the performance by a magnitude of 10x.

Mike Blumenkrantz discovered a missing Gallium3D capability "cap" that needed to be set for Zink and in turn the very small code change yielded around a 10x performance increase for running the Doom game atop the Zink driver.

The code has been merged and is for setting Gallium3D's PIPE_CAP_SURFACE_REINTERPRET_BLOCKS when running atop a Vulkan 1.1 driver or a Vulkan driver exposing the KHR_maintenance2 extension.

Mike Blumenkrantz continues working relentlessly to improve the Mesa driver code as part of his work on Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team. Blumenkrantz wrote a new blog post as well today to express his frustration in all of the different Gallium3D caps and how simply being unaware of one/some caps to set can lead to missing performance optimizations -- in this case a 10x performance boost.