Raspberry Pi developers announced the certification of the v3dv graphics driver by the Khronos organization, which has successfully passed over 100,000 tests from the CTS (Kronos Conformance Test Suite) and is recognized as fully compliant with the Vulkan 1.1 specification.
The driver has been certified using the Broadcom BCM2711 chip, which is used in the Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 400, and Compute Module 4 boards. The verification was performed on a Raspberry Pi 4 board with the Raspberry Pi OS distribution based on Linux kernel 5.10.63, Mesa 21.3.0, and X-server. Obtaining the certification allows for an official statement of compatibility with graphical standards and to use related Khronos trademarks.
In addition to Vulkan 1.1, the v3dv driver also includes support for geometry shaders and extensions not covered by the Vulkan specification. The support for the 3D debugger RenderDoc and the tracer GFXReconstruct has been improved. Moreover, there has been a significant increase in the performance of the code generated by the shader compiler in both OpenGL and Vulkan drivers, positively impacting the speed of applications that heavily utilize shaders, such as games based on the Unreal Engine 4. The graph below shows the performance increase of some games in percentage:
All noted changes in the v3dv driver have already been accepted into the main Mesa project and will soon be available in the Raspberry Pi OS distribution. The v3dv driver is limited to the support of the VideoCore VI graphics accelerator, used starting from the Raspberry Pi 4 model. For older boards, the RPi-VK-Driver is being developed separately, which implements only a subset of the Vulkan API since the capabilities of the VideoCore GPU supplied in boards before Raspberry Pi 4 are insufficient for a full implementation of the Vulkan API.
Source: opennet.ru
