Developer Mike Blumenkrantz has announced that they're now being funded by Valve, so Blumenkrantz's work on the OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan with 'Zink' will continue.
Hold on, what actually is Zink? As described by Collabora dev Erik Faye-Lund it's an "OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan. Or to be a bit more specific, Zink is a Mesa Gallium driver that leverages the existing OpenGL implementation in Mesa to provide hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available".
After working on Zink for a while, Mike Blumenkrantz posted a blog entry back on November 6 saying it was the "last day" due to the end of it being hobby work while being between jobs. In a new blog post titled "Don't Call It A Comeback", Blumenkrantz mentions that "Valve has generously agreed to sponsor my work on graphics-related projects" and that the focus will be on Zink.
The plan for Zink is a big one and things are moving quickly. Working together with Collabora developer Erik Faye-Lund, together they're doing "Operation Oxidize" to get the majority of their work in progress code for Zink into mainline Mesa by the end of the year. This will give Zink basic OpenGL 4.6 and OpenGL ES 3.2 support along with "vastly" improved performance.
Nice to see Valve continuing to get involved with open source and Linux to improve all sorts of areas.
For those curious on the question of why — well, Vulkan is the future. This video can explain it in more details:
Direct Link
Quoting: 3zekielAcutally, will this also work on top of Nvidia driver ?
Let's hope so, Nouveau can always use more love.
Perkeleen_Vittupää Nov 24, 2020
Quoting: tmtvlQuoting: 3zekielAcutally, will this also work on top of Nvidia driver ?
Let's hope so, Nouveau can always use more love.
In which Nvidia itself is in short supply of.. Why exactly do they NOT help? What is the use of a closed driver anyhow in this day and age?
ShinyaOsen Nov 24, 2020
TheRiddick Nov 25, 2020
Quoting: TheRiddickIs Apple ditching Metal API? I heard it has been left in the dust and the games that do run on it don't perform too well.. this is why you embrace open standards!
I don't think they have announced anything but the new apple cpus are ARM based and are APUS with apple enhanced versions of mali so gaming is not really their focus. The apple silicon has the Vram for the system on the CPU its as far removed from x86 architecture as it can get according to linus.
TheRiddick Nov 25, 2020
Apple aren't going to move away from Metal unless they come up with something else that they completely control. They control the full hardware stack, the OS, the APIs, and the tools that devs are able to use. They can change any of them at will to benefit what they want to do with the Apple ecosystem.
TheRiddick Nov 26, 2020
Last edited by TheRiddick on 26 November 2020 at 9:00 pm UTC
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