Imagination GPUs With PVR Vulkan + Zink Working Well For OpenGL 4.6

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Imagination GPUs With PVR Vulkan + Zink Working Well For OpenGL 4.6

We've known since last year when Imagination published their open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver that they'd be focusing on a Vulkan hardware driver only and using the likes of the Zink compatibility layer for OpenGL support. Today Imagination formally announced OpenGL 4.6 for their GPUs via Zink...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/PVR-Zink-Imagination-OpenGL-4.6

[kiffmet]

It's nice that Zink sees ever more widespread usage. This adds a lot of additional test cases and will hopefully also lead to further contributions and performance enhancements to the project. That a big company like Imageon deems the project production and enterprise ready already tells a lot about the insane achievement the Zink devs have accomplished.

[espi]

Is there anyone left using Imagination GPUs? Their GPUs were top notch on iPhones but Apple went away to do their own thing (though apparently "Apple" GPUs are pretty much just Imagination GPUs anyways, so maybe Apple is still paying for licenses and whatnot). I never heard of a consumer product with Imagination GPUs outside of iPhone.

[coder]

Is there anyone left using Imagination GPUs?

A few Chinese dGPUs are rumored to use Imagination's IP. Probably the one in the news most lately is MooreThreads' S80, although I think they haven't ever publicly disclosed they're sourcing from Imagination.

Also, Imagination is now offering its own RISC-V cores + other IP blocks, in hopes of becoming a "one stop shop" for SoCs, like ARM.

[fahrenheit]

Unisoc and Mediatek appear to have used PowerVR as recently as 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR#Implementations

Obviously there could be other users.

[blackshard]

Bastards. They never collaborated with opensource communities and always kept their drivers binary-only and now they profit (even) more from opensource work.

[coder]

Unisoc and Mediatek appear to have used PowerVR as recently as 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR#Implementations

That's interesting, because I assumed MediaTek had switched completely over to Mali.

They've also been flirting with Nvidia... but I don't know if anything ever got released, based on that partnership. Maybe their partnership with Nvidia arose after they dumped PowerVR and they needed to find another second source to give them leverage in licensing negotiations with ARM.

[coder]

Bastards. They never collaborated with opensource communities and always kept their drivers binary-only

They're supposedly working on open source drivers. I'm not sure how that's going, though.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/PowerVR-DRM-Driver-v3

[Quackdoc]

can't wait to see this running on the mesa PVR driver

They're supposedly working on open source drivers. I'm not sure how that's going, though.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/PowerVR-DRM-Driver-v3

it's going great so far, 200 merged commits and and actively developed in mesa, as well as an open source kernel driver (to which I don't know the status)

EDIT:
Kern: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/frank...e/powervr-next
Mesa: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests?scope=all&state=opened&label_name[]=powervr

[rmfx]

That’s the way to go.
Why bother using something else than Zink for gl ?

I hope they contribute in exchange though.