Zink In Mesa For OpenGL Over Vulkan Should Be Back To Supporting OpenGL 3.0 Soon

Zink, the project going on for almost two years for implementing OpenGL over Vulkan, might soon be exposing OpenGL 3.0 and OpenGL ES 2.0 within mainline Mesa.

Some OpenGL 3.0 functionality was previously disabled from Zink as part of upstreaming it back for Mesa 19.3, but those GL 3.0 bits could soon be restored. Getting OpenGL 3.0 back into shape, which includes restoring textured buffer objects, instanced rendering, transform feedback, and other features.

OpenGL ES 2.0 is quite possibly around the corner too, but hasn't been tested yet.

It's known at this point Zink has a lot of room to improve performance but the limited time spent on this code is largely focused for now on tackling more OpenGL extensions rather than scoring well in benchmarks.

Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund was talking about the state of Zink in early 2020 for generic OpenGL over Vulkan drivers during last week's FOSDEM conference. For those that weren't in attendance, there are WebM/VP9 and MP4 recordings.