Here's a fun bit of driver and hardware news as Imagination announced their GPUs now support OpenGL 4.6 up from OpenGL 3.3 and it's thanks to the open source Zink driver. In their announcement they mentioned how they worked with Collabora to make this happen, the open source consulting firm that has many developers working all across Linux including the kernel, graphics drivers and much more.
As they said:
Support has been achieved by working alongside the open-source specialists at Collabora. Collabora’s Zink is a layered OpenGL® implementation, part of the open-source Mesa project, that allows OpenGL® 4.6 content to run on top of a native Vulkan driver. For Imagination GPUs, this is a win-win. While OpenGL® is now being used less frequently by developers who are preferring newer APIs such as Vulkan and DirectX, due to its previous popularity there are numerous legacy applications that wouldn’t work on Imagination hardware if we didn’t have driver-level support for its final version. Delivering support for OpenGL® 4.6 via our Vulkan drivers is as elegant solution that keeps our graphics stack simple.
They also showed off a demo of it:
Direct Link
See their announcement here.
Really great to see so many companies moving more towards making use of open source, and working with others to make it happen. This is how it should be done. I'm sure it won't be long before we start seeing this sort of thing as the norm, as OpenGL use falls off with more moving to modern rendering APIs using Zink is a great solution that continues to improve all the time.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: elmapulwhat company is that? they make gpus for companies or something like that?Imagination Technologies makes PowerVR GPUs which are used in some ARM chipsets.
dziadulewicz Jul 6, 2023
PowerVR also powered a little console called Dreamcast from sega, another from sony PsVita, and many phones like Iphone.
Also, imagination claims that have a scalar architecture. If they scale up, hopefully they can make a decent powerful gpu.
Last edited by jordicoma on 6 July 2023 at 5:08 pm UTC
Quoting: jordicomaI want imagination to make PowerVR gpus for computers like before.
They tried with the Kyro series a couple decades ago, but it was a bit of a flop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR#Series3_%28STMicro%29
Chuckaluphagus Jul 6, 2023
Quoting: dziadulewiczImagination is a company and competition for Nvidia, Intel and AMD? Or what's the deal here. I have apparently never heard about Imagination until now!To my knowledge, there hasn't been a PowerVR video card available for about 20 years now (the last ones I heard of were the Kyro and Kyro II series). They license their designs to CPU manufacturers for integrated video implementations. Intel used them extensively, especially with low-end laptops and netbooks, until about 10 years ago. Anything with an Intel Atom processor used an Imagination video design, I believe. It caused problems for the Linux community because, there was no good support and Imagination did not want to help developers to get it working.
PoliticsOfStarving Jul 9, 2023
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