Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Has Many Improvements With Mesa 22.1

With Mesa 22.1 due to be branched in the next day or so as the feature freeze for this quarterly Mesa update, Valve developer Mike Blumenkrantz has penned a new blog post outlining all of the Zink changes accomplished this cycle.

Blumenkrantz and other Mesa developers remain very active in enhancing this OpenGL over Vulkan translation layer. Over the past year Zink has become quite proficient at implementing OpenGL over the Vulkan API and doing so with reasonable speed. In more recent months there has been plenty of bug fixes pouring in, implementing more functionality to get more modern games running on this Gallium3D based code, and even work on new Vulkan extensions to make for a more efficient implementation of this emulation layer.

Mike characterizes the Zink changes for Mesa 22.1 as around a lot of bug fixing. Plus there is the initial Kopper code that was merged that will play an important role moving into the future.

Lavapipe as the software Vulkan driver implementation has also seen a lot of work for Mesa 22.1. Blumenkrantz summed up the Lavapipe happenings as getting Vulkan 1.3 support plus many optimizations and numerous new extensions supported.

More details on these Zink/Lavapipe happenings ahead of the Mesa 22.1 imminent branching over on Mike's blog.