Fri Jun 28, 2019 6:33 pm

I'm curious what potential benefits there could be for getting Vulkan on Raspberry Pi and similar devices.



I understand one of the potential advantages of Vulkan is that writing a Vulkan driver is said to be much easier than an OpenGL driver, as the Vulkan API tends to map more directly how how modern GPU hardware actually works, and the large amount of state management that OpenGL drivers need to do is almost entirely avoided in the Vulkan drivers.



On top of this.. I wonder if a good Vulkan driver could then provide good Desktop OpenGL support using the likes of Angle which is implementing OpenGL and OpenGL ES on top of Vulkan. In this case a good Vulkan driver delivers a good OpenGL and OpenGL ES driver for "free". Perhaps that type of API translation would be too slow on even the Pi 4, but the potential to provide a high bang for buck for Raspberry Pi Trading's limited engineering resources is intriguing to me.



It's fun to think about.