Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Now Nearly At ~69% Of Intel's Native OpenGL Driver

The Zink Gallium3D code for Mesa that is mapping OpenGL on top of the Vulkan API continues making great progress particularly with the near-daily work by developer Mike Blumenkrantz.

After taking the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan code to experimental OpenGL 4.6 support in his development code-base, he's been working on tuning the performance.

After 50~100% performance boosts and even more optimizations after that, Blumenkrantz ended September with Zink performing at roughly half the speed of Intel's Iris Gallium3D OpenGL "native" driver with the hardware he has been testing.

But now mid-way through October he has taken the demanding Unigine Heaven tech demo on Zink to running at about 68.5% the speed of the native Intel OpenGL driver. Seeing a generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan solution perform at nearly 70% the speed of Intel's well-tuned (and well funded) OpenGL driver is quite an accomplishment and even more exciting is that Mike continues making good progress on even more optimizations and other improvements.

He shared news of the 68.5% hit via his blog along with notes on some compute shader fixes that help SuperTuxKart and other work.

Some of the Zink improvements have been working their way into Mesa 20.3-devel but hopefully more of his improvements will reach mainline soon. Once more of this work is in Mesa Git there will surely be more Zink benchmarks on Phoronix.