Zink brings conformant OpenGL on Imagination GPUs

Today, Imagination Technologies announced some very exciting news: they are now using Zink for full OpenGL 4.6 support! Collabora had the pleasure of working together with engineers from Imagination to make this a reality, and it’s very rewarding to now be able show the results to the world!

More importantly, this is the first time we’ve seen a hardware vendor trust the OpenGL-on-Vulkan Mesa driver enough to completely side-step a native OpenGL driver and use it in a shipping product. It’s wonderful to see that Zink can realistically be used as a work-horse, especially in a high-performance graphics setting.

Zink started out as a small R&D project at Collabora, but has since grown to be a full-on community project. None of this would have been possible without the awesome work done by Mike and the other Zink contributors!

Conformance

One small detail from Imagination’s post that I think is important to highlight is that the solution is officially conformant. This is the first product to be officially conformant using Zink, but it’s not going to be the last! In fact, we only need one more conformant implementation before Zink itself is conformant as a generic layered implementation, according to the Khronos Conformant Product Criteria.

An Open Source graphics future

In the not too distant future, we should be able to combine Zink with the in-progress open source driver from Imagination, and that’s when things will really start to shine for the open source graphics stack on Imagination hardware. So there’s plenty more to look forward to here!