Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Performance Looking Very Good For Intel Arc Graphics

Mesa's Zink driver that implements OpenGL atop the Vulkan API has for a while been in wonderful shape for open-source AMD Radeon graphics and even in decent shape for the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack while it's also been getting into more robust shape for use on Intel's dedicated graphics cards.

Zink lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz recently got his hands on an Intel Arc Graphics A770 graphics card. For at least Doom (2016), the performance with Zink is now much better than what can be seen when using the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver.

With the Intel Arc Graphics A770 for running DOOM 2016 on Linux with the native Iris driver, he was seeing around 49 FPS while under Zink he was hitting over 100 FPS. Now this is likely an extreme example but in any event very positive news and motivating for a fresh round of Zink benchmarking on Phoronix.

More details via Mike's blog. He's also called out AMD with their AMDVLK driver that has now exposed the VK_EXT_vertex_input_dynamic_state extension, which is useful for Zink... Except AMDVLK currently explicitly is not exposing it for Zink.