[Posted November 1, 2018 by jake]<\/p>\n
Introducing Zink, an OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan (Collabora blog)<\/b><\/p>\n
[Development] Posted Nov 1, 2018 17:55 UTC (Thu) by jake<\/p>\n
Over at the Collabora blog, Erik Faye-Lund writes<\/a> about Zink<\/a>, which is an effort to create an OpenGL driver on top of Vulkan that he has been working on with Dave Airlie. “One problem is that OpenGL is a big<\/b> API with a lot<\/b> of legacy stuff that has accumulated since its initial release in 1992. OpenGL is well-established as a requirement for applications and desktop compositors.<\/p>\n But since the very successful release of Vulkan, we now have two main-stream APIs for essentially the same hardware functionality.<\/p>\n It’s not looking like neither OpenGL nor Vulkan is going away, and the software-world is now hard at work implementing Vulkan support everywhere, which is great<\/b>. But this leads to complexity<\/i>. So my hope is that we can simplify things here, by only require things like desktop compositors to support one API down the road. We’re not there yet, though; not all hardware has a Vulkan-driver, and some older hardware can’t even support it. But at some point in the not too far future, we’ll probably get there.<\/p>\n This means there might be a future where OpenGL’s role could purely be one of legacy application compatibility. Perhaps Zink can help making that future a bit closer?”<\/p>\n