Zink Merged Into Mesa 19.3 For Offering OpenGL Over Vulkan
Zink is the effort led by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund for offering a generic OpenGL/GLES implementation that runs atop Vulkan. While it's exciting prospects and well into the future could allow hardware vendors to avoid having to maintain OpenGL drivers with instead focusing on Vulkan, for now there is still a long road ahead for performance and features. Right now Zink supports just OpenGL 2.1 / OpenGL ES 2.0. With time though there are plans for supporting OpenGL 3.x/4.x and OpenGL ES 3.x functionality. At least with Zink, the existing OpenGL code inside Mesa/Gallium3D is doing much of the heavy lifting.
As time allows I'll be working on some performance tests showing where the capability of Zink is today for running OpenGL over Vulkan.
Mesa 19.3 will go into feature freeze potentially this week while its stable release should be out around the end of November or most likely early December. Mesa 19.3 is another feature-packed release for ending out 2019 with Zink just being the latest addition.
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