Zink Mesa 21.3-dev Benchmarks - Increasingly Capable Of Running OpenGL Games Atop Vulkan

Zink as an OpenGL-over-Vulkan API implementation living within Mesa merged its sub-allocator code that could deliver 10x the performance for some games. Plus it also landed OpenGL compatibility context support for getting more games working now with this open-source GL-on-VLK solution. Given the progress made in Mesa Git over the past week, here are some fresh benchmarks now for how the performance stands across various games and benchmarks.

With the Zink improvements merged last week, I carried out some before/after tests of the Mesa Git state. Plus not only looking at the Zink performance itself but how it compares to just using the native OpenGL driver (RadeonSI) of the system. All of the graphics benchmarking in this article was making use of an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card. The before/after was prior to the sub-allocator and compatibility context support landing and then afterwards.

There still are the occasional problems with Zink but now in very good shape for a number of games as about to be shown with good performance and correct rendering.

Besides the noted changes, no other system changes were made during testing. Following these comparison results is also a look at how the performance of Zink can be made even faster via a lazy descriptors feature not currently enabled by default with Mesa 21.3 Git.