Just a couple of weeks ago, we reported on the status of Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan driver & future plans based on a presentation made by Igalia at the Open Source Summit 2020 at the end of October.
At the time, the V3DV Vulkan Mesa driver for Raspberry Pi 4 was merged into Mesa, passed over 100,000 tests in the Kronos Conformance Test Suite (CTS), and was said to implement the full Vulkan 1.0 API. So it should come as no surprise that Khronos has now declared the Raspberry Pi drivers to be conformant with Vulkan 1.0 specifications.
This was tested in Raspberry Pi OS with Linux 5.4.51 using X11 display server at 1920×1080 resolution on Raspberry Pi 4. Vulkan 1.0 conformance means the V3DV Mesa driver has passed all tests from Khronos CTS and should be compatible with most applications using this version of the API. The drivers will work on all Broadcom BCM2711 platforms including Raspberry Pi Computer Module 4 and Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard computer.
But as we’ve seen in our previous post there’s still more work to do, as Igalia plans to improve performance by making better use of Texture Filtering Units (TFUs), optimize the Windows System Integration (WSI), as well as start working on the Vulkan 1.1 API implementation.
The Raspberry Vulkan driver is already included on the latest Mesa 20.3 release, but it may take a bit more time before it’s included in Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS repositories.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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