Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Benchmarks Are Very Competitive To Radeon OpenGL Driver

The Xonotic open-source FPS game was another title where RadeonSI and Zink performed effectively the same with the Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card.

I also used GPUTest for running a number of synthetic OpenGL test cases. Generally Zink was performing well against RadeonSI with tis AMD RDNA2 graphics card.

When taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks carried out for this article, Zink was running at 93% the speed of the RadeonSI driver for the wide range of games/tests! Overall this was the most impressive showing we have seen out of Zink to date and for a number of games this open-source OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation either matched or outperformed AMD's RadeonSI OpenGL driver. Especially with OpenGL use tending to be now for older Linux games with more of the newer and heavier titles focusing on the Vulkan API directly, even in cases where Zink didn't outrun RadeonSI it still tended to deliver a very sufficient experience for a current-generation graphics card.

When looking at the CPU usage over the span of all the OpenGL benchmarks carried out, to much surprise the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan run actually led to lower CPU usage than with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

There wasn't much of a difference in any of the GPU vitals between the Zink and RadeonSI runs for these Linux gaming focused tests.

The Zink performance shows the potential for efficient OpenGL over Vulkan use. It will be interesting to see ahead if any vendors take this route for future GPU hardware support rather than maintaining native OpenGL driver support, similar to Intel with Arc Graphics on Windows going for Direct3D 9 over Direct3D 12 rather than maintaining a native D3D9 driver for their discrete GPUs. The only game of those I attempted that ran into problems with Zink was Deus Ex: Mankind Divided where there was a crash but the other games had ran and rendered without any issues and much better than the early days of Zink.