Zink Squeezes Some More Performance Optimizations In Mesa 22.2 For OpenGL On Vulkan

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz who works on Zink for OpenGL implemented atop Vulkan has managed some more performance optimizations with the upcoming Mesa 22.2 quarterly feature release.

Blumenkrantz blogged in his usual creative style about Zink improvements around dealing with Vulkan render passes and transfer operations. It started off when a Linux gamer reported texture flashes when running Unreal Tournament 99 with Zink.

Mike Blumenkrantz profiling UT99 with RenderDoc. Unreal Tournament 99 ultimately being rendered with Vulkan by way of Zink.

Zink received support for command stream reordering for transfer operations when dealing with multiple command buffers and helps avoid splitting render passes. But some of the key takeaways:

It’s not perfect, but it’s quite effective in not turning the driver code to spaghetti while yielding some nice performance boosts.

It’s also shipping along with the other changes in Mesa 22.2.

More details on Mike's blog.

I'll have up some fresh Zink benchmarks soon. Mesa 22.2 is working its way toward its official release around the end of August.