Here's a short and sweet update on the work for Zink, the upcoming OpenGL on top of Vulkan implementation announced by Collabora which has been progressing steadily.
As a quick refresher: 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. More on the why can be found here.
Developer Mike Blumenkrantz has been hacking away at Zink code lately, after announcing back in November 2020 that Valve jumped in to fund more work on it. In a fresh blog post, Blumenkrantz mentions the continued sponsorship from Valve, and as a result Zink can now run with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux with the wording "So now zink+nvidia is a thing.". See it in action below:
Once it's ready, it's going to be extremely interesting to see what becomes of it.
Update: there's a fresh post that went up after this article was published, giving a lot more information on how Zink works with NVIDIA. Right now it's very slow but that should improve when "WSI" support lands in the near future which will benefit all drivers that Zink supports.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Last edited by Nanobang on 4 February 2021 at 2:26 pm UTC
When DEs finally start to migrate from Opengl to Vulkan, Would I be able to use Zink to translate the Vulkan calls to Opengl on unsupported Vulkan computers?
Or to use Zink I must have a processor with Vulkan support?
The one think I still don't know about Zink:
When DEs finally start to migrate from Opengl to Vulkan, Would I be able to use Zink to translate the Vulkan calls to Opengl on unsupported Vulkan computers?
Or to use Zink I must have a processor with Vulkan support?
You will need to have Vulkan support. Zink goes from OpenGL to vulkan. Doing Vulkan over OpenGL would be a total nightmare (not even sure it would be practically possible).
The point here is that when in a not so distant future vulkan is ubiquitous, and opengl begin being dropped, new hw can just support legacy sw with zink. Also, even for current hw, pure gigantic OpenGL drivers are likely to suffer from bitrot as time pass... Less testing, means slowly regressions will creep up unnoticed. So Zink will takeover for legacy sw when it becomes really necessary.
I am actually positively surprised this issue is taken care of now, while we have good reference drivers, so before it is too late to do it right.
Also, for some embedded targets like rpi4, and rpi5 when it will follow, this will probably allow much better OpenGL support, since OpenGL driver never was so great ... And Vulkan driver is wayyyy simpler to do.
You will need to have Vulkan support. Zink goes from OpenGL to vulkan.
Really? I've always though Zink was a software to convert Vulkan calls to "sane" OpenGL.
I guess some terms ate confusing when english is not your first language
Thanks for the clarification
Last edited by BielFPs on 4 February 2021 at 10:01 pm UTC
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