XDC 2025 happened at the end of September, beginning of October this year, in Kuppelsaal, the historic TU Wien building in Vienna. XDC, The X.Org Developer’s Conference, is truly the premier gathering for open-source graphics development. The atmosphere was, as always, highly collaborative and packed with experts across the entire stack.
I was thrilled to present, together with my workmate Ella Stanforth, on the progress we have made in enhancing the Raspberry Pi GPU driver stack. Representing the broader Igalia Graphics Team that work on this GPU, Ella and I detailed the strides we have made in the OpenGL driver, though part of the improvements affect also the Vulkan driver.
The presentation was divided in two parts. In the first one, we talked about the new features that we were implementing, or are under implementation, mainly to make the driver more closely aligned with OpenGL 3.2. Key features explained were 16-bit Normalized Format support, Robust Context support, and Seamless cubemap implementation.
Beyond these core OpenGL updates, we also highlighted other features, such as NIR printf support, framebuffer fetch or dual source blend, which is important for some game emulators.
The second part was focused on specific work done to improve the performance. Here, we started with different traces from the popular GFXBench application, and explained the main improvements done throughout the year, with a look at how much each of these changes improved the performance for each of the benchmarks (or in average).
At the end, for some benchmarks we nearly doubled the performance compared to last year. I won’t explain here each of the changes done, But I encourage the reader to watch the talk, which is already available.
For those that prefer to check the slides instead of the full video, you can view them here:
Outside of the technical track, the venue’s location provided some excellent down time opportunities to have lunch at different nearby places. I need to highlight here one that I really enjoyed: An’s Kitchen Karlsplatz. This cozy Vietnamese street food spot quickly became one of my favourite places, and I went there a couple of times.
On the last day, I also had the opportunity to visit some of the most recomendable sightseeings spots in Vienna. Of course, one needs more than a half-day to do a proper visit, but at least it helps to spark an interest to write it down to pay a full visit to the city.
Meanwhile, I would like to thank all the conference organizers, as well as all the attendees, and I look forward to see them again.