A future Wine release could use Zink to run OpenGL via Vulkan

A new Wine merge request has been opened that is very interesting, as it could change the way Wine work with OpenGL to make it use Vulkan.

Developed by Rémi Bernon from Wine devs at CodeWeavers (who also work with Valve on Proton), it's titled " opengl32: Just use Zink (as PE-side OpenGL implementation)" and notes in the text:

This embeds the Mesa 26.0.3 subset needed to build Zink, as an OpenGL PE-side implementation over PE-side Vulkan.

Steam and "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic" work, which means everything else will as well.

The basic idea seems to be to use Zink, the OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan that was introduced by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund back in 2018. It has come a long way since then in terms of features and performance, and with drivers and developers focusing a lot more on Vulkan now - this could end up being quite a fun feature if accepted into Wine.

What would be the point of it? We could see even better compatibility and performance in a future Wine release, and perhaps fewer driver issues with so much focus on Vulkan.