Another Quarter Down

As everyone who’s anyone knows, the next Mesa release branchpoint is coming up tomorrow. Like usual, here’s the rundown on what to expect from zink in this release:

• zero performance improvements (that I’m aware of)
• Kopper has landed: Vulkan WSI is now used and NVIDIA drivers can finally run at full speed
• lots of bugs fixed
• seriously so many bugs
• I’m not even joking
• literally this whole quarter was just fixing bugs

So if you find a zink problem in the 22.1 release of Mesa, it’s definitely because of Kopper and not actually anything zink-related.

Piping

But also this is sort-of-almost-maybe a lavapipe blog, and that driver has had a much more exciting quarter. Here’s a rundown.

New Extensions:

• VK_EXT_debug_utils
• VK_EXT_depth_clip_control
• VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library
• VK_EXT_image_2d_view_of_3d
• VK_EXT_image_robustness
• VK_EXT_inline_uniform_block
• VK_EXT_pipeline_creation_cache_control
• VK_EXT_pipeline_creation_feedback
• VK_EXT_primitives_generated_query
• VK_EXT_shader_demote_to_helper_invocation
• VK_EXT_subgroup_size_control
• VK_EXT_texel_buffer_alignment
• VK_KHR_format_feature_flags2
• VK_KHR_memory_model
• VK_KHR_pipeline_library
• VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product
• VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation
• VK_KHR_swapchain_mutable_format
• VK_KHR_synchronization2
• VK_KHR_zero_initialize_workgroup_memory

Vulkan 1.3 is now supported. We’ve landed a number of big optimizations as well, leading to massively improved CI performance.

Lavapipe: the cutting-edge software implementation of Vulkan.

…as long as you don’t need descriptor indexing.