Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team is the one who has been driving the development forward on Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver. While traditionally focused on getting OpenGL games running over Zink, recently he has taken to optimizing Zink for workstation graphics.

Blumenkrantz has been using SPECViewPerf as the workstation graphics standard benchmark for evaluating Zink's potential and performance relative to the RadeonSI Gallium3D hardware driver. Zink started out at just around 18 FPS while the RadeonSI driver could deliver around 100 FPS for SPECViewPerf.

Earlier this month Blumenkrantz [1]nearly doubled the performance to 34 FPS .

On Tuesday he announced the latest milestone: over 60 FPS for SPECViewPerf on Zink. It's still well short of the RadeonSI performance level for the moment, but much better than just weeks ago at 18 FPS.

More details on these latest Mesa improvements via [2]this blog post . Blumenkrantz concluded this latest blog post with:

"And this is driving ecosystem improvements which will affect other apps and games which don’t even use zink.

Stay winning, Open Source graphics."



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zink-Optimizing-Viewperf

[2] https://www.supergoodcode.com/now-we-cad/