A really small change to the Zink driver, that gives OpenGL support on top of Vulkan, has given an ~10x speed boost for DOOM (2016). Other games are likely to benefit from this change too but DOOM was the one where an issue was noticed.
Writing on their blog last week, developer Mike Blumenkrantz noted that a really odd issue was found where "Even as early as the title screen, framerate would struggle to hit 30fps for a while before rocketing up to whatever maximum it could reach. In-game was the same, soaring to the 200fps maximum after enough time standing stationary without moving the camera. As soon as the camera shifted however, back to 20fps we went.".
After investigating they found the problem and a merge request that was accepted for Mesa that's only around 4 lines has fixed the issue to allow DOOM to run at full-speed on the Zink driver.
Makes me often wonder how many things can be fixed up by such small changes.
What's the point of the Zink driver? As the Mesa documentation states: "The Zink driver is a Gallium driver that emits Vulkan API calls instead of targeting a specific GPU architecture. This can be used to get full desktop OpenGL support on devices that only support Vulkan.".
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: TheRiddickIs Zink doing performance fixing on a per Game basis? if so it may take them a few hundred years to catch up. lolThey are, but most often than not it's not really for 1 game, just a more general improvement noticed because it affects 1 game more so that is what is noticed and triggers the effort to fix/improve it
Same thing as happens with WINE, where fixed bugs are even listed in changelogs in the version they notice a reported issue was fixed, not in the version that actually fixed it (because they often only notice a change helps game Y much later than it was made to help another issue in game X)
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