Zink GL-Over-Vulkan Now Supports Conditional Rendering - Stepping Towards OpenGL 3.0

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Zink GL-Over-Vulkan Now Supports Conditional Rendering - Stepping Towards OpenGL 3.0

The Zink Gallium3D driver project that is layering OpenGL over Vulkan is one step closer to exposing OpenGL 3.0 capabilities...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zink-Conditional-Rendering

[Lanz]

Looking forward to the day when all APIs just translate to Vulkan and manufacturers only have to write a Vulkan driver.

[duby229]

Looking forward to the day when all APIs just translate to Vulkan and manufacturers only have to write a Vulkan driver.

(I think) Vulkan still needs some extensions to support translating OpenCL. A full function OpenCL to Vulkan I think is the last piece to a flawless open source experience on Vega.

[eydee]

Looking forward to the day when all APIs just translate to Vulkan and manufacturers only have to write a Vulkan driver.

All? That would end up being an infinite loop, when trying to translate Vulkan to Vulkan.

[emblemparade]

Looking forward to the day when all APIs just translate to Vulkan and manufacturers only have to write a Vulkan driver.

Definitely very exciting. There will come a day when OpenGL will be removed from drivers, and things like Zink will be the only way to run older software.

I'm imagining that proprietary drivers (on Windows etc.) would actually include something Zink built-in, as a transition, while they strip away the direct OpenGL support code.

[Dark-Show]

Once each sector of the GPU market is using devices with Vulkan, I'm sure driver development time will be pushed to only Vulkan to save resources.

I can't wait.

[Ladis]

I'm imagining that proprietary drivers (on Windows etc.) would actually include something Zink built-in, as a transition, while they strip away the direct OpenGL support code.

Microsoft has its own way how to convert all APIs to one, means spending resources only on one API in the hardware driver: They forked Google's ANGLE library converting OpenGL (ES) to Direct3D and added support for Direct3D 11 & 12 (had DX 9 at the time). This wrapper was then used in the Unity game engine for the WindowsPhone port. It's also useful when you target Microsoft Store (where's a limited set of APIs visible through the sandbox). Microsoft even offers Visual Studio for free, even for commercial use in small companies (the full one, not just VS Code). And also offers a VS template using their attached ANGLE library. In other words, you download VS and their ANGLE + template from (their ) GitHub and start programming OpenGL (ES) app which automatically uses Direct3D 11/12 instead (automatically chooses depending on the OS it runs on). This way your app works on systems without real OpenGL (sandbox in Microsoft Store, Windows 10 on ARM, Xbox, Windows phone and whatever hardware their support).

[polarathene]

Nvidia should throw some financial support / devs on this then and get similar functionality for OpenGL ES to provide Wayland support over Vulkan on their cards? It's a subset of OpenGL right, so that shouldn't be too big of an ask? Or because it's Gallium/Mesa based, is it only possible for Noveau and not the proprietary drivers to use?

[hvis]

Nvidia should throw some financial support / devs on this then and get similar functionality for OpenGL ES to provide Wayland support over Vulkan on their cards? It's a subset of OpenGL right, so that shouldn't be too big of an ask? Or because it's Gallium/Mesa based, is it only possible for Noveau and not the proprietary drivers to use?

That's an interesting idea. But indeed, Zink if for Gallium-based drivers only.

I'm also puzzled to hear about a big performance difference. After all DXVK runs at near-native speed, and DX and OGL should be similarly powerful. Hope this is just a question of spending more time on optimization.

[kusma]

That's an interesting idea. But indeed, Zink if for Gallium-based drivers only.

(Zink main developer here)

That's not quite right. Zink is a Gallium driver, it doesn't require one. Vulkan drivers don't generally use Gallium, because Gallium is a higher level abstraction than Vulkan.

So from this perspective, it should be possible to use Zink with NV drivers. However, there's another road-block currently; NV drivers don't support DRI2, which is a requirement at the moment. This has to do with integration into the windowing system. I'm sure that can be worked around somehow, but that's not something I'm planning on doing.