Igalia Confirms Raspberry Pi 4, 400, Compute Module 4 Vulkan Graphics Driver Conformance Milestone
Year-long project to create an open Vulkan driver for the VideoCore VI hits a major milestone, though bug-fixing continues.
Igalia’s Iago Toral has confirmed that his group's effort to create a Vulkan graphics driver for the VideoCore VI processor at the heart of the Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and Raspberry Pi 400 has hit a major milestone: official confirmation that it is Vulkan 1.0 conformant.
Announced earlier this year, the effort to create an open source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4's Broadcom VideoCore VI GPU started with the "hello, world" of graphics: The display of a single triangle on-screen. Now, the project has officially been tested as Vulkan 1.0 conformant — and has been accepted and merged into the Mesa project upstream.
"As of 24 November the V3DV Vulkan Mesa driver for Raspberry Pi 4 has demonstrated Vulkan 1.0 conformance," writes Igalia's Iago Toral of the milestone. "Khronos describes the conformance process as a way to ensure that its standards are consistently implemented by multiple vendors, so as to create a reliable platform for application developers. For each standard, Khronos provides a large conformance test suite (CTS) that implementations must pass successfully to be declared conformant; in the case of Vulkan 1.0, the CTS contains over 100,000 tests."
"Vulkan 1.0 conformance is a major milestone in bringing Vulkan to Raspberry Pi, but it isn’t the end of the journey. Our team continues to work on all fronts to expand the Vulkan feature set, improve performance, and fix bugs."
Supporting Vulkan, which has among its design goals a reduction in overhead and corresponding performance increase on lower-end and embedded hardware, is a major step in unlocking the performance of the VideoCore VI GPU for a variety of software applications. The news that it has been merged to the Mesa upstream project goes still further, ensuring that the advantages of the new driver are available to all - not just those running the Raspberry Pi OS Linux distribution.
More information is available on the Raspberry Pi blog.