Vulkan and Hardware video drivers
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I recently read very early Vulkan drivers can now be downloaded and compiled on Raspberry Pi4. I am currently using Retropi 4.6, 64-bit 5.4 kernel, and KMS video. Would there be any advantages to installing this Vulkan driver at this time? Also is there any hardware video support on this at all? To me the video seems quite snappy and if that is all CPU this is going to be a hell of a beast.
Thank you!
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@Big_D Its very much a work in progress. There wouldnt be any advantages at this time. Im personally going to wait until its fully released.
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@Big_D
Getting there it looks like. -
That's a different Vulkan driver although it looks to be way further along. That driver will work for any of the Video Core 4 Pi's, so basically every Raspberry Pi outside of the 4. The Pi 4 is Video Core 6 so we're still waiting on that alpha driver. Gotta say though, it does seem that engineer has a really good grasp on the architecture and may end up leap frogging the actual commissioned team working on VC6.
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@snipes21 said in Vulkan and Hardware video drivers:
@Big_D
Getting there it looks like.Yes I saw this on my feed yesterday. Very exciting indeed, but then I suppose we don't know whether this is going to be openly available, and if it is, is there a chance it could be used in future Retropie releases? It's one thing to have an Nvidia engineer create such a thing in his spare time, but it's another thing entirely for that individual to make it freely available, and then for the team at Retropie to be able to utilise it.
Still it's very exciting to me and I would love to be able to use it on my beloved Pi3B+ or indeed my Pi Zero, since it's alleged to be fully compatible. Do we have an official take on this?
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you can compile the VC4 rpi driver if you want - give it a go: https://github.com/Yours3lf/rpi-vk-driver
you would need to change retropie build scripts to use it, and i anticipate more or less nothing 3d will work since the hardware isn't vulkan compliant, and so the driver is missing features: https://github.com/Yours3lf/rpi-vk-driver/wiki/FAQ
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you would also need to rebuild emulators with vulkan support (retroarch, libretro cores, ...)
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@dankcushions said in Vulkan and Hardware video drivers:
you can compile the VC4 rpi driver if you want - give it a go: https://github.com/Yours3lf/rpi-vk-driver
you would need to change retropie build scripts to use it, and i anticipate more or less nothing 3d will work since the hardware isn't vulkan compliant, and so the driver is missing features: https://github.com/Yours3lf/rpi-vk-driver/wiki/FAQ
Oh. Lol.
To be fair the developer says there that it isn't really a Vulkan driver:
"RPi-VK-Driver is a low level GPU driver for the Broadcom Videocore IV GPU that implements a subset of the Vulkan (registered trademark of The Khronos Group) standard. The implementation is not conformant to the standard (therefore it cannot be called a Vulkan driver, officially) but tries to follow it as closely as the hardware allows for it. Compared to the available OpenGL drivers it offers superb speed including precise and predictable memory management and multi-threaded command submission. It also offers a wider feature set such as MSAA support, low level assembly shaders and performance counters. On the other hand it currently does not support GLSL shaders."
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Pi4's Vulkan driver has been merged into the Mesa repo. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/vulkan-update-merged-to-mesa/
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