High Speed Raspberry Pi GPU driver released
This is pretty damn cool, in his spare time an Nvidia engineer built a Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi Zero, 1, 2, and 3.
Dear followers,
— Martin Thomas (@0martint) June 19, 2020
after more than 2 years I'm incredibly proud to announce that RPi-VK-Driver is now released. It's the first low-level GPU driver for the Broadcom Videocore IV GPU powering the @Raspberry_Pi
Please find it here:https://t.co/BGMk8x4CG3
Support for the Raspberry 4 is already being worked on by the Raspberry Pi foundation but appears to be a ways off. Following some of the discussions on Twitter and GitHub, there is some coordination now with the team building support for the Raspberry Pi 4.
The perform is really good compared to the regular GPU support which is based on OpenGL. The Vulkan driver has some limitations and does not fully support the Vulkan API.
If you have done any gaming on Windows you know OpenGL is generally a really slow way of accessing the GPU and performance is far slower than DirectX.
Vulkan is a project by Khronos Group that aims to replace OpenGL & DirectX by offering a low-level high-performance cross-platform GPU API.
The main advantage of Vulkan has improved parallel tasking and work distribution to multiple cores.
Part of the difficulty with creating drivers like this for the Raspberry Pi is Broadcom's restrictive nature to their products.
You can find more information about this project on GitHub.
If you have a pressing need to play Quake 3, this may be just what you need.
VkQuake3 running at 100+ FPS on a @Raspberry_Pi 3B+ using the new low level RPi-VK-Driver pic.twitter.com/UhhYgQrAEi
— Martin Thomas (@0martint) June 19, 2020
Amazing Invention
The Pi is never going to be a gaming powerhouse, but if this makes a few more games playable then it's great. I'd like to find time for some of the retro gaming emulators out there. Just not playing many games these days.
The Pi could be all the computer some people actually need if it can handle general web stuff. Many people just want social media and videos.
More thinking desktop performance and media center.
Now that I think about it though RetroPie works really well but Super Nintendo is harder to emulate and requires a Pi 3 and Pi 4 is even better. With good drivers you might be able to even run PlayStation 3 emulator which has advanced a lot.
You might find this interesting.
Say hi to the little man.
Quake 3.... I am feeling 18 again :)
However, I do not think, like others in the comments, that such a device is meant for gaming. At least from the perspective of quite recent games that require a lot of power.
If you scroll up a couple of comments there is a video of a guy who got a lot more working using box86.
Oh! Totally interesting (and shocking in the good sense)!
Thanks for your contribution to the STEMsocial community. Feel free to join us on discord to get to know the rest of us!
Please consider supporting our funding proposal, approving our witness (@stem.witness) or delegating to the @stemsocial account (for some ROI).
Please consider using the STEMsocial app app and including @stemsocial as a beneficiary to get a stronger support.
#posh