Zink driver for OpenGL over Vulkan continues maturing with a big performance fix

Zink continues to be a promising Mesa driver for Linux that runs OpenGL on top of Vulkan. It's not finished yet and so continues seeing some big performance fixes.

The latest comes from another blog post by developer Mike Blumenkrantz, who noted from a Phoronix benchmark that performance actually went down recently with Zink instead of up. The game in question was Tesseract, an open-source engine derived from Cube 2: Sauerbraten with more modern rendering features added in.

The problem? Blumenkrantz tested directly and showed a screenshot of it running at only 11FPS with Zink. Clearly not good, especially when a normal OpenGL driver could run it at many 100s of FPS. The root of the issue appeared to be how Tesseract "uses 3-component vertex attributes that aren’t supported by AMD hardware" and so it ends up using a Gallium component called vbuf to translate it to what AMD does support and the result is a performance bomb. Thankfully it's fixed, and now performance is clearly much better with it hitting over 600FPS:

While this might only be one game. There's no doubt others out there that do similar things considering just how many games exist and so it will likely have helped performance with other games too.