Raspberry Pi 5 Graphics Continue With Open-Source Driver & Crazy Fast Compared To RPi 4

With my Raspberry Pi 5 review and benchmarks I focused on the CPU performance of the quad-core Cortex-A76 2.4GHz Broadcom SoC powering this new single board computer, but the graphics upgrade are just as equally impressive. Here is a look at the open-source driver support and performance for the Raspberry Pi 5's VideoCore VII GPU.

The Raspberry Pi 5 features a Broadcom VideoCore VII GPU, up from VideoCore VI found with the Raspberry Pi 4. The VideoCore VII is capable of OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2. The driver support for the Raspberry Pi continues to build upon the open-source V3D driver stack within Mesa and the Linux kernel that was established for the Raspberry Pi 4.

Raspberry Pi and their Igalia partners didn't upstream the open-source driver support in advance but waited until launch day to post the initial patches... Presumably to not spill the beans about the Raspberry Pi 5 that initially wasn't expected for 2023. But at the same time this now means months before all of the Raspberry Pi 5 graphics support is upstreamed and in stable/released versions.

The Raspberry Pi 5 launch day saw 3 patches for the V3D kernel driver to enable the Raspberry Pi 5 support. These changes by Igalia amount to just around 200 lines of changed code for enabling the kernel driver support.

Also submitted today were the V3D Gallium3D and V3DV Vulkan driver changes for VideoCore 7.1.x support in this merge request. There the changes are more invasive: 127 commits to modify the existing OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for supporting the new hardware. These pending patches get the full OpenGL ES and Vulkan conformance test suites passing. The Mesa driver side support means some 5.5k lines of new code and 1.3k lines of code removed (or changed).

The V3D and V3DV driver changes will hopefully be merged for Mesa 23.3 that will be out as stable in ~November. The V3D DRM kernel driver changes will -- given their small changes -- be picked up for the Linux 6.7 cycle but that stable kernel release won't appear until early 2024.

At least for those using the Raspberry Pi OS, the graphics driver support is already in place in their to-be-released update. I've been running Raspberry Pi OS on the Raspberry Pi 5 review unit and the graphics support has been working out well. This is also now in the Wayland-enabled world where the Wayfire compositor is powering the Raspberry Pi desktop.

It's been a smooth experience for the Raspberry Pi 5 graphics and the VideoCore VII has been successfully tested at 4K@60 without issue. The Raspberry Pi OS build for the Raspberry Pi 5 has been based on Debian 12 with a Linux 6.1-derived kernel and Mesa 23.2-rc3 with the extra patches for driver support.

Let's now look at what the performance impact is going from the Raspberry Pi 4 to Raspberry Pi 5.