Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan vs. RadeonSI OpenGL Performance As Of January 2021

With the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa on a nice upward trajectory with most recently now having the backing of a Valve contract developer and a focus on getting the backlog of patches to this Gallium3D code upstreamed, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at where the performance currently stands when using Zink atop the RADV Vulkan driver compared to using the native RadeonSI driver with this round of testing from a Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card.

Zink earlier this month achieved OpenGL 4.1 on mainline and then yesterday saw OpenGL 4.2 exposed. Given the flurry of Zink work by multiple developers in recent weeks, Phoronix readers have been curious to see some fresh benchmarks of this generic OpenGL implementation built atop the Vulkan API and Mesa doing much of the heavy lifting.

This latest round of Zink testing was done on a System76 Thelio Major system with Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card. Mesa 21.1-devel as of this morning was used for testing both the RadeonSI native OpenGL driver and the Zink code atop RADV. The Oibaf PPA was used for simplicity in obtaining the build atop the Pop OS / Ubuntu 20.10 base.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite various OpenGL benchmarks were carried out.