Zink Is Ending 2021 In Fantastic Shape For OpenGL Over Vulkan

Following all the work carried out by Mike Blumenkrantz (Valve) and others, the Mesa Zink code is ending the year in terrific and very capable shape for OpenGL running atop the Vulkan API. Here is a look at where things currently stand with mainline Mesa for Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan compared to the native RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver.

Particularly during the latter half of the year, there have been many fixes and optimizations going into Zink. A lot of exciting work has been merged to mainline while more functionality is still pending and will work its way into mainline past the new year. But long story short for those behind on their Phoronix reading, Zink has come a heck of a long way this year for generic OpenGL over Vulkan with many more games now running, much more capable performance, and other feature/compatibility work with more on the road ahead.

For those wondering about the state today for Zink with mainline Mesa, here are some fresh benchmarks. My last time testing Zink was in August and since then Blumenkrantz has worked on fixes for the various games reported to have issues and even more performance optimizations, making this round of testing now quite interesting.

Using Mesa 22.0-devel as of 26 November (using the Oibaf PPA for easy reproducibility), I ran benchmarks of various OpenGL Linux games using the native OpenGL driver (RadeonSI in this case) and then again when using Zink running atop the RADV Vulkan driver. This testing was done on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X system with AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card. The focus is on seeing how Zink compares to using RadeonSI OpenGL across a variety of Linux games.