Do we get Vulkan on Pi 4?

[pootle]

Just askin....

[6by9]

Not at the moment, but the possibility is being explored.

[pootle]

mmm that would be tasty. Won't hold me breath though

[Gavinmc42]

Khronos will offer a bounty?
It will happen, how soon depends on motivation and probably more VC6 info?

[dickon]

Khronos? Gods help us all...

[blackshard83]

Khronos has nothing to do with implementation of Vulkan, they just define the standard and compliance.
It's not their intent or purpose to create the drivers for the devices.

[dickon]

Yeah, but ... OpenMAX.

[6by9]

Yeah, but ... OpenMAX.

"Designed" by committee!

[Gavinmc42]

Khronos has nothing to do with implementation of Vulkan, they just define the standard and compliance.
It's not their intent or purpose to create the drivers for the devices.

Pretty sure I saw Khronos offer $$$ for a port of OpenVX to Raspberry Pi 3?

[dickon]

Yeah, but ... OpenMAX.

"Designed" by committee!

I prefer the word 'congealed'. It seems more likely.

[6by9]

Yeah, but ... OpenMAX.

"Designed" by committee!

I prefer the word 'congealed'. It seems more likely.

I was on a couple of telecons for IL, and attended one face-to-face.
About 6 main companies each wanting their own stamp on it, and only one of them was from the "customer" side, the rest were SoC vendors.
I'm not sad to see the back of it.

[dickon]

You must have done something very bad in a past life to have deserved that...

[mic_s]

I'm not envolved, there is currently no open Vulkan driver for VideoCore VI --- but if you like you may take a look at :

https://github.com/Yours3lf/rpi-vk-driver

(Just to play with. It is very rudimentary and based on the old QPUs in videocore IV, it is not the vulkan driver Eben mentioned elsewere. That one will probably based on the qpus in the videocore V/VI.)

[Gavinmc42]

There was probably no incentive to get Vulkan working on VC4, it would have been very hard.

Now the Pi4 is a different animal, with dual 4K screens.
And what little we know suggests the VC5/6 has the extra bits needed?

Once a Vulkan driver is available the Pi4 is then compatible with all those professional level Vulkan tools.
Vulkan on settop boxes etc.
Gaming on settop boxes = gaming on Pi4?
Who knows maybe Broadcom will release a blob

How it will happen and when will it happen, no idea.
But it will happen
Vulkan is available on most platforms now, Pi4 is just one more platform.

[battlebottle]

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.

[Gavinmc42]

I did some more Vulkan fact finding.
Probably best to worry about this after there is a nice 64bit OS for the Pi4's.
ARM Vulkan tools etc are mostly 64bit.

[Gavinmc42]

Broadcom have one Vulkan compliant product, will it be two soon?

BCM7278 CTS Version: 1.1.2.0
CPU: ARM
OS: Linux
GPU: VideoCore VI HW (V3D-630)

https://www.khronos.org/conformance/ado ... ission_344

Does that mean there is a driver out there somewhere for the Videocore VI?