Imagination Technologies GPus already have OpenGL 4.6 support
Recently the news broke that Imagination Technologies announcement via a blog post support for the OpenGL 4.6 graphics API on their GPUs, implemented using the open Zink driver developed in the Mesa project repository.
It is mentioned that the support was implemented by the Collabora developers together with that imagination engineers to perform the Zink implementation.
Collabora had the pleasure of working alongside the Imagination engineers to make this a reality, and it's so gratifying to now be able to show the results to the world!
The Collabora developers mention that this is the first time seeing a hardware vendor trust the OpenGL-on-Vulkan Mesa driver enough to bypass a native OpenGL driver entirely and use it in a shipping product.
It's wonderful to see that Zink can realistically be used as a workhorse, especially on high performance graphics settings.
About the controller Zinc, it is mentioned that this provides an implementation of OpenGL over Vulkan to enable hardware accelerated OpenGL on devices that only support the Vulkan API.
It is highlighted that Zink's performance is close to the performance of native OpenGL implementations, lor that it allows hardware manufacturers not to spend resources implementing OpenGL on their GPUs and to limit themselves to supporting only the Vulkan API on them and implementing OpenGL through a layer. Imagination Technologies was the first manufacturer to use this scheme.
Support has been achieved by working together with the open source specialists at Collabora. Zink is a layered OpenGL® implementation, part of the open source Mesa project, that allows OpenGL® 4.6 content to run on top of a native Vulkan driver. For Imagination GPUs, this is a win-win. While OpenGL® is now used less frequently by developers who prefer newer APIs such as Vulkan and DirectX due to its earlier popularity, there are numerous legacy applications that would not work on Imagination hardware if we did not have support for controller level. for its final version. Providing support for OpenGL® 4.6 through our Vulkan drivers is an elegant solution that keeps our graphics stack simple.
This project has been one of several open source projects from Imagination. As a company, we value the contribution that open source technology offers to the ecosystem, allowing developers to excel in specific areas of differentiation rather than reinventing the wheel each time.
The prepared solution was successfully tested in the CTS test suite (Khronos Conformance Test Suite) and was found to be fully compliant with the OpenGL 4.6 specification. This is the first zinc-based product to be officially certified by Khronos.
According to Khronos criteria, if another Zink-based implementation is certified, the Zink driver itself, as a universal layer, will be officially recognized as OpenGL 4.6 compliant. Obtaining a certificate allows you to officially declare support for graphic standards and use the Khronos trademarks associated with them.
Among other work, Imagination Technologies highlights the development of an open set of drivers for its GPUs based on the Rogue architecture. The set includes a DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver for the Linux kernel, a driver with an initial implementation of Vulkan 1.0, and a set of firmware for the GPU.
The Vulkan driver has already been committed to the Mesa mainstream, and the DRM driver is preparing to be incorporated into the Linux kernel. In the future, Zink support may be added to this set and a fully open graphics stack for Imagination hardware with OpenGL and Vulkan support will be available.
Finally, If you are interested in knowing more about it, You can check the details in the original note in the following link