Zink Working On Sparse Textures, Other Improvements To Kick Off 2022

After taking a roughly month-long holiday, Mike Blumenkrantz -- who has been leading the work on Mesa's Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Valve -- is back at the game.

Blumenkrantz and others involved with Zink made very impressive strides in 2021: Zink now allows for OpenGL 4.6 implemented over Vulkan, the performance is in rather good shape and continues getting better, and more games are running fine atop this component. There has also been other accomplishments like Wayland compositor support, getting the proprietary NVIDIA driver runningm etc.

To start Zink's 2022 development, Blumenkrantz has been working on sparse texture support. There is a pending merge request for implementing OpenGL ARB_sparse_texture support for Zink. (Not directly related, just recently RadeonSI finally added sparse texture support as the first Mesa driver implementing ARB_sparse_texture support.)

Blumenkrantz also blogged that he has been working on improving the driver's query code stemming from GPU hangs when running the Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator. Additionally, he has been working on Gallium Nine support that can work with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as the latest Source Engine game able to do so.

It will be interesting to see how well optimized and useful Zink proves to be in 2022 with a future where vendors may just focus exclusively on Vulkan support and leave it to Zink and other compatibility layers for supporting other graphics/compute APIs.