Pending Patches Allow Direct3D 9 "Gallium Nine" To Run Over Mesa's Zink Vulkan

Mesa's Zink is well known for working to provide a generic OpenGL implementation over the Vulkan API that can be used across hardware/drivers. While still focused on OpenGL-over-Vulkan, with some pending patches it turns out Zink can support Gallium3D Nine for ultimately allowing Direct3D 9 atop this layer.

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz who continues making impressive progress on Zink recently took to getting the Gallium3D Nine state tracker working with Zink.

Blumenkrantz has a few merge requests pending that thanks to the work tackled in conjunction with Nine's Axel Davy now allow this state tracker to work on Zink.

The pending code mentioned on Mike's blog is at least enough to get D3D9 samples running atop Zink that in turn is being rendered via Vulkan. Granted, with DXVK there is already Direct3D 9/10/11 atop Vulkan, while this is just another route.

In addition to getting Nine running on Zink, Mike has also been achieving more performance optimizations and slowly getting more of the "zink-wip" work-in-progress code upstreamed to mainlined Mesa.