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Raspberry Pi Foundation Begins Working on Vulkan Driver

posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 03 2020, @07:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the cross-platform-support dept.

takyon writes:

Vulkan is coming to Raspberry Pi: first triangle

Following on from our recent announcement that Raspberry Pi 4 is OpenGL ES 3.1 conformant, we have some more news to share on the graphics front. We have started work on a much requested feature: an open-source Vulkan driver!

Standards body Khronos describes Vulkan as "a new generation graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs". The Vulkan API has been designed to better accommodate modern GPUs and address common performance bottlenecks in OpenGL, providing graphics developers with new means to squeeze the best performance out of the hardware.

Be warned that the effort could take months or even years.

Also at Phoronix.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday February 03 2020, @08:25PM (7 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) on Monday February 03 2020, @08:25PM (#953280) Journal

    Vulkan is barely distinct from openGL in implementation, and I don't know why they didn't just do openGL 5.0, and instead did this weird half-fork thing.

    • (Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Monday February 03 2020, @08:57PM (5 children)

      by loonycyborg (6905) on Monday February 03 2020, @08:57PM (#953288)

      You kidding? Vulkan works in totally different way than OpenGL in pretty much all respects. Vulkan's working title was GL Next though. Good thing they gave it distinct name since otherwise it would be goddamn confusing!

      • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday February 03 2020, @09:08PM (4 children)

        by ikanreed (3164) on Monday February 03 2020, @09:08PM (#953294) Journal

        It's like the exact same interfaces and APIs though. I guess I'm complaining about a sports car having a different name from a sedan when they have the same chassis, but different engines. But it still feels wrong.

        • (Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Monday February 03 2020, @10:04PM (2 children)

          by loonycyborg (6905) on Monday February 03 2020, @10:04PM (#953316)

          Just how are they same? Not only all functions are named different, they also work in different way. OpenGL keeps pretty much everything in global state while vulkan is object-oriented api with no global state.

          • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday February 03 2020, @10:21PM (1 child)

            by ikanreed (3164) on Monday February 03 2020, @10:21PM (#953320) Journal

            I guess that's fair and I think I should concede to overall point but "different names" is a bit of a stretch, it's often just like vKCreateBuffer vs glCreateBuffer.

            • (Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Tuesday February 04 2020, @08:03AM

              by loonycyborg (6905) on Tuesday February 04 2020, @08:03AM (#953469)

              Those uses of word Buffer refers to totally different usage patterns in both apis. And most cases of words shared between api names come from 3d rendering math/gpu programming concepts. So using this logic you could conclude that direct3d is a variant of opengl/vulkan too.

        • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 04 2020, @02:51AM

          by fustakrakich (6150) on Tuesday February 04 2020, @02:51AM (#953388) Journal

          Yeah, it was just a Falcon with a 302

          --
          La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday February 03 2020, @09:23PM

      by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Monday February 03 2020, @09:23PM (#953295) Journal

      https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/vc4-and-v3d-opengl-drivers-for-raspberry-pi-an-update/ [raspberrypi.org]

      The GPU bundled with Raspberry Pi 4 is a VideoCore VI capable of OpenGL ES 3.2, a significant step above the VideoCore IV present in Raspberry Pi 3 which could only do OpenGL ES 2.0. Despite the fact that both GPU models belong in Broadcom’s VideoCore family, they have quite significant architectural differences, so we also have two separate OpenGL driver implementations. Unfortunately, as you may have guessed, this also means that driver work on one GPU won’t be directly useful for the other, and that any new feature development that we do for the Raspberry Pi 4 driver stack won’t naturally transport to Raspberry Pi 3.

      [...] At present, the V3D driver exposes OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 2.1. As I mentioned above, the VideoCore VI GPU can do OpenGL ES 3.2, but it can’t do OpenGL 3.0, so future feature work will focus on OpenGL ES.

      >>>the VideoCore VI GPU can do OpenGL ES 3.2, but it can’t do OpenGL 3.0,
      > Can you give a bit more details on this issue?

      It is an issue with HW limits. Videocore VI hw only supports up to 4 multiple render targets.

      For OpenGL ES that is enough, as the minimum value for GL_MAX_DRAW_BUFFERS is 4 (see table 6.27 on OpenGL ES 3.0 spec).

      But for OpenGL 3.0 that is not enough, as the minimum value for GL_MAX_DRAW_BUFFERS is 8 (see table 6.51 on OpenGL 3.0 spec).

      Not sure what version of Vulkan is targeted (1.0/1.1/whatever).

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04 2020, @12:00AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04 2020, @12:00AM (#953348)

    Can they fix the hardware issues first?

    I'd rather they fix the passive cooling issues with the RPi4 that cause the thermal throttling during multi-core tasks and the damn non-standard USB-C cable crap.

    I'm really not trying to be to be a Negative Nancy, and I really DO like these SBCs. Things were really going so well each new generation of the boards, until version 4.

    Hopefully they will fix these things in the next board release, but in the meantime, I really struggle to have any excitement over this news like I would have in the past.

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