Nvidia Engineer Releases Open-Sourced Vulkan Graphics Driver for the Raspberry Pi (tomshardware.com) 20
Long-time Slashdot reader frootcakeuk quotes an article from Hot Hardware: Earlier this year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation hooked up with Igalia to start development on an open-sourced Vulkan graphics driver for the Raspberry Pi. However, Martin Thomas, an engineer at Nvidia, beat them to the punch.
Thomas announced yesterday via his personal Twitter that his RPi-VK-Driver is ready for primetime. The talented engineer had been working on the Vulkan driver in his spare time for more than two years.
Technically, Thomas' iteration isn't a Vulkan driver per se because it doesn't comply with the official standards established by The Khronos Group. Nonetheless, the resourceful developer produced a driver that adheres to the Vulkan parameters as much as possible, and as close as the hardware would permit it. There's just one limitation with the RPi-VK-Driver though. Unlike the official Vulkan driver that's still in the works, Thomas' version is only compatible with the Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU that's found inside the Raspberry Pi 1, 2, 3 and Zero devices.
Thomas announced yesterday via his personal Twitter that his RPi-VK-Driver is ready for primetime. The talented engineer had been working on the Vulkan driver in his spare time for more than two years.
Technically, Thomas' iteration isn't a Vulkan driver per se because it doesn't comply with the official standards established by The Khronos Group. Nonetheless, the resourceful developer produced a driver that adheres to the Vulkan parameters as much as possible, and as close as the hardware would permit it. There's just one limitation with the RPi-VK-Driver though. Unlike the official Vulkan driver that's still in the works, Thomas' version is only compatible with the Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU that's found inside the Raspberry Pi 1, 2, 3 and Zero devices.
No RPi 4? (Score:2)
I was willing to test it on my RPi 4 but I guess I'll have to wait.
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It's not on the 4 because there is a more official one coming for the 4:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/bl... [raspberrypi.org]
"An Nvidia Engineer..." (Score:2)
A Broadcom lawyer.....
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The Broadcom VideoCore IV is 3-cluase BSD licensed [wikipedia.org]. Has been since like 2014 [arstechnica.com]. Only two parts are closed. One is video accel which building a Vulkan driver for wouldn't explicitly need. Two is the thread manager RTOS that runs within the VPU on the chip, which would have nothing to do with the devel of a Vulkan driver. Additionally, many of the FOSS drivers do thread management on the ARM outside the VPU now-a-days [freedesktop.org], just in case you were wondering about that latter part. So worry not.
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... and an Internet Troll enter a bar.
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I knew that didn't sound right.
Anyway...
"An Nvidia Engineer, a Broadcom lawyer and an Internet Troll walk into a bar."
(write the rest below)
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5 minutes later the engineer walks out again since he realized he couldn't tell the other two apart.
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Then RMS ducked...
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Hurray? (Score:2)
So, are we going to get faster arcade and console emulation, even on the Raspberry Pi Zero?
Re: Hurray? (Score:1)
Not necessarily. Vulkan (OpenGL5) is too new to be used in most emulators. The VideoCore has decent library support by existing libraries and hardware acceleration isn't really necessary until you get past the Nintendo64
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Re: Hurray? (Score:2)
He's right. Minus the lack of a space before "5".
Vulkan is a radical change, but it *is* the successor.
Though "OpenGL 2 1.0" (think "Toy Story 2, version 1.0") would probably be more correct.
But in times of Chrome "version" 85.0 (more like 1.0.85) and math like 7-1=Vista (making VistaVistaVista the mark of the devil :), nobody of the current kids seem to have ever heard of semantic version numbers anyway.
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Is there any evidence at all that Vulkan is faster than the equivalent driver?
This is, after all, a third-party driver, and Vulkan is nothing more than a different way of talking between the programmer and the chip, and if I remember from when I opened up the Broadcom driver source for the RPi chips, they are nothing more than shunts between OpenGL function prototypes and almost-identical hardware-function-calls to the base hardware (but with a bit of parameter tweaking and error checking).
So... no... I don
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Nope.
Re: Does anybody else.. (Score:2)
Says the foe with the Hitler quote in his profile. We know you're the one who always anonymously posted 50 swastikas. Admit it.
Re: Does anybody else.. (Score:3)
Yes. Wondering why he did not write open source drivers *for nVIdia cards* was obviously the first thing I thought of.