Mesa On Windows Continues Improving: Dzn Dynamic Rendering, WGL Kopper Lands

While to date no major hardware vendors are focusing on their open-source Mesa-based drivers for running on Windows (though there has been independent work like building RADV on Windows), other Mesa code is seeing interest and usage under Windows.

As regular Phoronix readers already know, Microsoft has been investing a lot in leveraging Mesa for usage on Windows for cases of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) or where there are not native hardware OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan drivers but by leveraging Mesa code can allow for running atop Direct3D 12 drivers. That Microsoft-led effort for exploiting Mesa for improving compatibility of open APIs/standards atop Direct3D 12 Windows drivers continues.

With Mesa 22.1 coming there is now the Dozen "DZN" implementation that is taking shape for Vulkan atop Direct3D 12. The latest to report on that front is dynamic rendering for DZN.

In addition to the dynamic rendering merge, DZN has seen KHR_draw_indirect_count added along with other recent Vulkan extensions. There has also been refactored error handling and other code improvements merged this week.

Separately, Zink on Windows is also becoming more of a reality for OpenGL on Vulkan support. As reported earlier this week, Zink on Windows is making progress with Kopper. This comes in part due to X-Plane looking to ship Zink as part of X-Plane 12 for plug-ins and other code reliant on OpenGL. Rather than relying upon OpenGL/Vulkan interoperability extensions that aren't well supported across platforms, X-Plane can just rely on Zink and the host Vulkan drivers for all the rendering support.

Since that prior article about improving Zink on Windows, this morning the WGL Kopper support was merged. It's also mentioned in that merge request the plan is to backport the WGL Kopper support for the Mesa 22.1 series.

Interesting times we live in with Mesa finding more and more use on Windows...