Raspberry Pi4 Granted Official Vulkan 1.1 Conformance - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Karel
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2021, 10:29:04 am
content: It's now official with The Khronos Group signing off on the Vulkan 1.1 conformance test results forthe V3DV driver running on the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single board computer.https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi-4-Official-VLK-1.1https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/vulkan-update-version-1-1-conformance-for-raspberry-pi-4/

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2021, 10:36:03 am
content: Does this means RPi doesn't depend on the proprietary GPU binary blob any more?Later edit:Searched for "Vulkan" and found out that Vulkan is a cross platform 3D API, so I guess the binary blob will still be needed.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2021, 05:19:37 pm
content: I admit I don't really know the benefits of Vulkan compared to OpenGL, especially on a modest GPU. Any pointers?

author: ejeffrey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 26, 2021, 10:43:15 pm
content: Vulkan is basically the replacement for the OpenGL family of APIs, which as far as I understand are no longer being developed. It's supposed to be lower CPU overhead and better able to make use of modern graphics pipelines than OpenGL.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2021, 04:58:48 pm
content: Quote from: ejeffrey on October 26, 2021, 10:43:15 pmThanks. Never actually looked at Vulkan so far, I've only used OpenGL. I'll try to have a look.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2021, 08:21:50 pm
content: I haven't looked at Vulkan either (haven't done OpenGL stuff either recently), so I took a gander.I'm running on a Debian-derivative, a mix of Ubuntu and Mate. I happened to have the main libraries (libvulkan1) already installed, so after installing mesa-vulkan-drivers (I'm running Intel HD 620 built-in graphics) and vulkan-utils, bothvulkaninfoandvulkan-smoketestworked fine; I do get obviously accelerated 3D.The development package, libvulkan-dev, has both C and C++ headers, and even provides pkg-config files, so using`pkg-config --cflags vulkan`and`pkg-config --libs vulkan`in Makefiles suffices to add the necessary compile and link time flags. Good. The Khronos GroupVulkan-Samplesgithub seems a good place to start development exploration; it contains links to further resources, too.My first impression is that it is definitely verbose, even for me. That's not a negative, though, because cross-platform compatibility often requires such verbosity; just an observation. Some may find it irritating, but it looks like a lot of it can be abstracted away (identical code for similar use cases), so I guess I don't mind. I do like the portability aspects of it a lot, even if it means one has to write more boilerplate code.To be any more specific, I'd need to have a practical test case at hand to explore/solve/develop for, to construct an opinion.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 27, 2021, 09:49:52 pm
content: @Nominal AnimalI wonder if the Vulkan support could be also used for mpeg-compressing/decompressing video and audio stream (from the network) so it could accelerate applications like "Team-view"

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 28, 2021, 12:35:20 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on October 27, 2021, 09:49:52 pmAs far as I can tell, it iswork in progress(Vulkan Video).

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 28, 2021, 12:43:17 am
content: Quote from: Nominal Animal on October 27, 2021, 08:21:50 pmAll samples seem to be strictly C++... but yes that gives a good idea.Quote from: Nominal Animal on October 27, 2021, 08:21:50 pmWell, uh... definitely. Ouch. It frankly looks a bit much at first sight to me, and I even have a hard time figuring out what the code could be doing, whereas OpenGL was much easier to figure out.I guess I'll need to RTFM.

author: ejeffrey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 28, 2021, 02:58:06 am
content: I'm not any kind of expert, I last did opengl programming a couple decades ago. But my understanding is that vulkan is largely intended for engine developers. If you just want to draw something they assume that you will use unity or whatever that can be built on top of vulkan. It's supposed to be more like directx12 which I have also never used.

author: Doctorandus_P
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 22, 2021, 06:53:31 pm
content: Vulkan was first announced by the non-profit Khronos Group at GDC 2015. The Vulkan API was initially referred to as the "next generation OpenGL initiative", or "OpenGL next" by Khronos, but use of those names was discontinued when Vulkan was announced.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan