Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Fixes Up Support For Another Game

Going from ~11 FPS to ~602 FPS for an open-source game marks the latest work on Zink for OpenGL atop Vulkan within Mesa.

Last week with my latest Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan benchmarks among the games tested was the promising Tesseract game. While Tesseract hasn't seen a new release in more than a half-decade, due to it being open-source and benchmark-friendly, it was among the games tested.

In those benchmarks, it ended up showing Zink performing very poorly and the latest Zink code regressing things further:

Mike Blumenkrantz who continues working on Zink via contract with Valve dived into the cause. Mike tracked it down to Gallium's VBUF code for translating vertex buffers and in the case of AMD Radeon hardware ultimately leading to stalling multiple times per frame with plenty of CPU work. After working through some other issues, Mike was able to take Tesseract on Zink from ~11 to ~602 FPS with correct rendering, and in turn fixing Zink code in the process even if this isn't the most popular (open-source) game.

More details on the Zink'ing Tesseract effort via Mike's blog.