Raspberry Pi Vulkan Driver Making Progress But Long Road Remains

Consulting firm Igalia that has been working under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on developing a Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs has provided a status update on their development efforts.

With Igalia doing a clean slate Vulkan driver since initiating the work last year, much progress is made but it's still far from being usable and optimized for RPi4 gamers. But even then there is the matter of Arm game compatibility leading to mostly open-source titles and emulators. In any case though, more Vulkan demos are now rendering with this driver.

Iago Toral of Igalia noted in a Raspberry Pi Foundation blog post they are up to passing over 70,000 tests for the Vulkan 1.0 CTS and have a significant amount of the API now covered. Basic Vulkan demos are now running gracefully on the Raspberry Pi 4.

Igalia is focused on getting Vulkan 1.0 implemented in full and then passing all of the CTS tests as well as bug fixing. Following that is when they can focus more aggressively on delivering good performance.

In addition to today's status update, Igalia is also finally transitioning their driver development to an open repository. Via a Mesa fork on FreeDesktop.org GitLab, this driver will now be developed more openly with community contributions accepted.