So some months have passed since our last update, when we announced that v3dv became Vulkan 1.0 conformant. The main reason for not publishing so many posts is that we saw the 1.0 checkpoint as a good moment to hold on adding new big features, and focus on improving the codebase (refactor, clean-ups, etc.) and the already existing features. For the latter we did a lot of work on performance. That alone would deserve a specific blog post, so in this one I will summarize the other stuff we did.

New features

Even if we didn’t focus on adding new features, we were still able to add some:

• The following optional 1.0 features were enabled: logicOp, althaToOne, independentBlend, drawIndirectFirstInstance, and shaderStorageImageExtendedFormats.
• Added support for timestamp queries.
• Added implementation for VK_KHR_maintenance1, VK_EXT_private_data, and VK_KHR_display extensions
• Added support for Wayland WSI.

Here I would like to highlight that we started to get feature contributions out of the initial core of developers that created the driver. VK_KHR_display was submitted by Steven Houston, and Wayland WSI support was submitted by Ella-0. Thanks a lot for it, really appreciated! We hope that this would begin a trend of having more things implemented by the rpi/mesa community as a whole.

Bugfixing and vulkan tools

Even if the driver got conformant, we were still testing the driver with several demos and applications, and provided fixes. As a example, we got Sascha Willem’s oit (Order Independent Transparency) working:

Among those applications that we were testing, we can highlight renderdoc and gfxreconstruct. The former is a frame-capture based graphics debugger and the latter is a tool that allows to capture and replay several frames. Both tools are heavily used when debugging and testing vulkan applications. We tested that they work on the rpi4 (fixing some bugs while doing it), and also started to use them to help/guide the performance work we are doing.

Fosdem 2021

If you are interested on an overview of the development of the driver during the last year, we are going to present “Overview of the Open Source Vulkan Driver for Raspberry Pi 4” on FOSDEM this weekend (presentation details here).

Previous updates

Just in case you missed any of the updates of the vulkan driver so far:

Vulkan raspberry pi first triangle
Vulkan update now with added source code
v3dv status update 2020-07-01
V3DV Vulkan driver update: VkQuake1-3 now working
v3dv status update 2020-07-31
v3dv status update 2020-09-07
Vulkan update: we’re conformant!