Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Now "100%-1000% Faster" For Many Scenarios

Mike Blumenkrantz working under contract for Valve on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation continues making remarkable progress on this Mesa code.

In addition to now having the aging Tomb Raider Linux port rendering correctly with Zink, there have been many performance optimizations figured out for Zink and currently staged via the "work-in-progress" branch.

Blumenkrantz specifically notes that there has been "an imperial units fuckton of general driver overhead reduction", rewriting of the queue/dispatch code that is more optimized for threaded and multi-context scenarios, the shader disk cache is now working properly, and sub-allocator code is working too.

He ended his latest blog post with, "One way or another, this is going to feel like a new driver. Ideally I’ll be doing a post every day detailing one of the items on that list, but for now I’ll close the post by saying that zink should be 100%-1000% faster (not a typo) in most scenarios where it was previously much slower than native GL drivers."

But for the moment this is still work-in-progress code that will hopefully get tidied up, reviewed, and merged to mainline Mesa in the near future. In any case, it sounds like soon will be time to run some fresh Zink benchmarks against some native OpenGL drivers.