While there has been less major progress to report on Mesa’s Zink OpenGL-over-Vulkan code in recent weeks, Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve and others continue optimizing and fixing this increasing useful implementation. Most recently the game Bioshock: Infinite is running on Zink and there are more fixes in aiming toward OpenGL 4.6 conformance.
Getting Bioshock: Infinite running on Zink is an important milestone as it was one of the games that previously failed during my last round of Zink benchmarking. Since that article Blumenkrantz had been working through the games that failed or had major performance problems. With Bioshock: Infinite now working, I believe that takes care of addressing all the major issues I previously brought up. Thus will be time for a new round of Zink benchmarks shortly on Phoronix.
Mike also noted that Zink on the RADV Vulkan driver is down to just around 200 failures for OpenGL 4.6 with the Khronos Conformance Test Suite (CTS). Zink has been exposing OpenGL 4.6 but is now inching quite close to becoming officially conformant — just a week ago it had more than 1,000 test failures.
Blumenkrantz is working on those CTS fixes, other bug fixes, and “some fun surprises to unveil in the near future” including getting Zink running on another Vulkan driver. More details on Mike’s blog.
