Blumenkrantz Boosts Zink Performance By 150% For Everspace, Possibly Helping Other Games

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team who is known for his work on the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation has made another mighty round of improvements for helping the gaming performance.

A bug report had come in that Zink performed very poorly for Everspace, a 3D space shooter game from 2017 that is powered by Unreal Engine 4.

Mike Blumekrantz ended up tracking down the issue and has adapted Zink to use the internal map flag for QBOs as well as a change to restrict the implicit feedback loop detection when using miplevels/layers. Together these changes make Zink around 150% faster for Everspace. In turn the Zink performance for this game is now similar to running the dedicated RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Mike notes that it's possible other games are helped by these two set of changes too, it was just Everspace he was using in responding to the bug report. More details on these Zink improvements for Mesa 25.0 via Mike's blog.