Zink OpenGL-Over-Vulkan With Unigine Heaven Seeing Improved Performance

Following word last week that the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer was seeing 50~100% performance gains, more details are now available.

This Mesa OpenGL software implementation over Vulkan has been seeing more performance optimizations by developer Mike Blumenkrantz following his remarkable work on getting OpenGL 4.6 up and running. He's been making a number of optimizations recently while last week's note of a "50~100%" improvement was certainly enticing albeit left wondering if it was just up to some OpenGL micro-benchmarks.

It turns out Blumenkrantz has been using the very demanding Unigine Heaven tech demo for stressing Zink and that's where he's been seeing these gains. That's the good news is the frame-rate gains are with Unigine Heaven, but unfortunately even with the latest code the performance still comes up short of "playable" frame-rates.

Those interested in the performance strides being made for this OpenGL implementation on Vulkan can see Mike's latest post entitled "Accelerate." That post ends with his performance figure for Unigine Heaven up to 18 FPS but tomorrow he says he'll be passing along more details on what appear to be further gains in performance.