Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Hitting ~95% Speed Of Native OpenGL Driver Performance

Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D implementation putting OpenGL 3.x/4.x on top of the Vulkan API is now offering near-native performance.

Mike Blumenkrantz who has been extensively working on Zink in recent time with implementing much of OpenGL 4.x as well as enhancing the performance has made great strides in making this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation a very capable alternative to dedicated OpeNGL drivers.

It was just last month that he was proud of hitting ~69% the speed of Intel's OpenGL driver while now he is up to roughly 95% the speed of the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver performance on the same hardware.

At least as far as the demanding Unigine Heaven demo is concerned, Zink is up to roughly 95% the performance of the native Intel OpenGL performance. This latest performance boost is coming thanks to greater threading and other optimizations.

Between his performance optimizations and OpenGL 4 patches, he has over 450 patches yet to be mainlined to Mesa. He will be working on that but as far as new developments are concerned he will be focusing less on the Zink hacking now that he's back to being employed.

More details on this last round of Zink optimizations for now by Blumenkrantz via his blog.