Zink OpenGL-Over-Vulkan With Unigine Heaven Seeing Improved Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Zink OpenGL-Over-Vulkan With Unigine Heaven Seeing Improved Performance

Following word last week that the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer was seeing 50~100% performance gains, more details are now available...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zink-Unigine-Heaven-Performance

[nokipaike]

I always assumed that sooner or later it would happen, it was just a matter of the zink code mature enough, and then the developers would have all the freedom to push and optimize according to their intuitions and their creativity. And I think this is just the beginning, I can't wait for the engineers to start getting more familiar with vulkan code and push the design of hardware that enters into symbiosis with vulkan to push the limits even further ... this level of freedom is not conditioned by market strategies, and could appear overnight, at any time.

[Chewi]

The resolution isn't mentioned but I think 18 FPS on Unigine Heaven isn't too bad. The 2700U (Vega 10) barely manages that at 1080p IIRC.

[FireBurn]

I always assumed that sooner or later it would happen, it was just a matter of the zink code mature enough, and then the developers would have all the freedom to push and optimize according to their intuitions and their creativity. And I think this is just the beginning, I can't wait for the engineers to start getting more familiar with vulkan code and push the design of hardware that enters into symbiosis with vulkan to push the limits even further ... this level of freedom is not conditioned by market strategies, and could appear overnight, at any time.

You just won buzzword bingo!!!

[FireBurn]

It would be cool if Zink was able to run Tomb Raider's Mountain Village faster than OpenGL in the future, though I am not sure whether the bottleneck is just in Mesa or also in the Tomb Raider binary itself.

I'd love if they updated the engine to use Vulcan directly, pretty sure the hard word was done for RotTR anyway

[Mthw]

Can someone explain to me why this needs to exist? OpenGL over Vulkan will always be slower than OpenGL directly, right? Not to mention just Vulkan is even faster. This almost feels like an excuse no to switch from OpenGL to Vulkan. Am I missing something here?

[log0]

Can someone explain to me why this needs to exist? OpenGL over Vulkan will always be slower than OpenGL directly, right? Not to mention just Vulkan is even faster. This almost feels like an excuse no to switch from OpenGL to Vulkan. Am I missing something here?

Compatibility imho. There is a lot of OpenGL code out there. And new drivers might not bother with implementing OpenGL.

[GruenSein]

Compatibility imho. There is a lot of OpenGL code out there. And new drivers might not bother with implementing OpenGL.

It is also beneficial to have a generic OpenGL implementation (if it ends up performing well in the future). Most vendor specific OpenGL drivers have their quirks and non-standard behavior.

[brenohrocha]

Can someone explain to me why this needs to exist? OpenGL over Vulkan will always be slower than OpenGL directly, right? Not to mention just Vulkan is even faster. This almost feels like an excuse no to switch from OpenGL to Vulkan. Am I missing something here?

Have you ever thought in the immensely vast of old OpenGL softwares out there? That the original developers will not update their code ever. Zink is a good news for present and future of 3D Graphics.

[Guest]

Does Zink have some kind of pre-compiled dll for testing? Specifically, I'd like to keep up with progress and try it out with Runescape. I remember D9VK having automated builds on some site (artifacts?)