Zink Mesa 21.3-dev Benchmarks - Increasingly Capable Of Running OpenGL Games Atop Vulkan

After carrying out those initial tests of the updated Zink code, lead developer Mike Blumenkrantz reminded me that there is also the "lazy descriptors" mode for Zink that can be activated via the ZINK_DESCRIPTORS=lazy environment variable. By that time a few days passed from when starting the testing so I then fetched the latest Mesa Git for the moment and re-conducted the testing -- just using that latest Mesa Git with default vs. ZINK_DESCRIPTORS=lazy for these remaining graphs.

With DDNet the performance went up even higher and inching closer to the RadeonSI level of performance when enabling lazy descriptors.

Dota 2 also saw a very significant boost to the performance with lazy descriptors enabled and nearing the RadeonSI level of performance...

ET: Legacy still has a ways to go in performing close to RadeonSI.

Similarly, Tesseract remained in rough shape.

Tomb Raider benefited a lot from Zink's lazy descriptors.

It still depends upon the particular game/engine for how well Zink can perform and if there are any rendering issues or stability problems to deal with, but as shown by this fresh round of tests, Zink is continuing to become quite performant for running OpenGL over Vulkan. The improvements that landed in Mesa 21.3-devel this past week are very significant and making use of ZINK_DESCRIPTORS=lazy can help out some games as well as shown. It will be interesting to see how the performance is for Mesa 21.3-devel as there still are more weeks to go until the code branching in October.