Quickly: ES 3.2

I’ve been getting a lot of pings over the past week or two about ES 3.2 support.

Here’s the deal.

It’s not happening soon. Probably.

Zink currently supports every 3.2 extension except for photoshop. There’s two ways to achieve support for that extension at present:

• the nice, simple, VK_EXT_blend_operation_advanced which nobody* supports
• the difficult, excruciating fbfetch method using shader rewrites, which also requires extensions that nobody supports

* Yes, I know that Nvidia supports advanced blend, but zink+nvidia is not currently capable of doing ES of any version, so that’s not testable.

So in short, it’s going to be a while.

But there’s not really a technical reason to rush towards full ES 3.2 anyway other than to fill out a box on mesamatrix. If you have an app that requires 3.2, chances are that it probably doesn’t really require it; few apps actually use the advanced blend extension, and so it should be possible for the app to require only 3.1 and then verify the presence of whatever 3.2-based extensions it may use in order to be more compatible.

Of course, this is unlikely to happen. It’s far easier for app developers to just say “give me 3.2” if maybe they just want geometry shaders, and I wouldn’t expect anyone is going to be special-casing things just to run on zink.

Nonetheless, it’s really not a priority for me given the current state of the Vulkan ecosystem. As time moves on and various extensions/features become more common that may change, but for now I’m focusing on things that are going to be the most useful.