For older Raspberry Pi boards, a GPU driver has been prepared with support for the Vulkan API

Submitted by first stable release of an open graphics driver RPi-VK Driver 1.0, which implements support for the Vulkan graphics API for older Raspberry Pi boards shipped with Broadcom Videocore IV GPUs. The driver is suitable for all pre-Raspberry Pi 4 Raspberry Pi board models from "Zero" and "1 Model A" to "3 Model B+" and "Compute Module 3+". Driver developed by Martin Thomas (Martin Thomas), an engineer from NVIDIA, however, the development was carried out as a personal project not related to NVIDIA (the driver has been developed for the past two years in his spare time). Code spreads under the MIT license.

Since the capabilities of the VideoCore IV GPU, which is equipped with older Raspberry Pi models, are not enough to fully implement Vulkan, the driver implements only a subset of the Vulkan API, which does not cover the entire standard, but tries to follow it as far as the hardware allows. However, the available functionality is sufficient for many applications and games, and the performance is well ahead of the OpenGL drivers, thanks to more efficient memory management, GPU multi-threading, and direct control of GPU operations. The driver also supports features such as MSAA (Multisample anti-aliasing), low-level shaders, and performance counters. Of the limitations, there is a lack of support for GLSL shaders, which are not yet available at this stage of development.

By the same author published a port of the Quake 3 game for the Raspberry Pi, serving as a demonstration of the capabilities of the new driver. The game is based on the ioQuake3 engine，which has added a modular rendering backend based on Vulkan, originally developed by the project Quake III Arena Kenny Edition. When using a new driver in a game managed to achieve renders in excess of 100 frames per second (FPS) on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ board at 720p output.

Recall that the Raspberry Pi Foundation, together with Igalia leads development of its Vulkan driver, which is in the early stages of development and will be ready to run some real applications in the second half of 2020. This driver is limited to support for the VideoCore VI graphics accelerator, used since the Raspberry Pi 4 model, and does not support older boards. Compared to OpenGL, using Vulkan allows you to achieve increasing productivity graphic applications and games.

Source: opennet.ru