Zink In Mesa 20.3 Now Hits OpenGL 3.3, Can Run Blender With This OpenGL-on-Vulkan

For weeks there have been patches getting the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation to OpenGL 4.6 while mainline Mesa has been at OpenGL 3.0 support. Thankfully the out-of-tree patch delta is being reduced and this week in Mesa 20.3-devel the code has been upstreamed getting the support level to OpenGL 3.3.

More code review of the Zink work-in-progress code is still needed for getting mainline Mesa to OpenGL 4.6 for this Gallium3D driver, but at least now with Mesa 20.3-devel it's up to OpenGL 3.3 rather than 3.0.

The recent Zink work landing in Mesa 20.3-devel includes geometry shaders, texture buffer objects, and other GL3 bits previously missing. Some initial OpenGL 4.0 code has also been merged including ARB_draw_indirect, ARB_sample_shading, and more. The recent work mainlined in regards to Zink for Mesa 20.3 are outlined via this blog post by Mike Blumenkrantz.

Blumenkrantz also noted that the Blender 3D modeling software can also now run on Zink with X11.

Hopefully it won't be too much longer before more of the OpenGL 4.x support and performance optimizations work their way to mainline.

Hitting OpenGL 3.3 in Mesa 20.3-devel for Zink comes just days after the developers celebrated the milestone of Zink running at ~69% the speed of Intel's native OpenGL driver on the same hardware.