Over recent months, the team at Igalia has been working on Vulkan driver support for the Raspberry Pi 4. Just this week, Igalia's Iago Toral made a progress announcement showcasing VkQuake 1-3 successfully running on the Raspberry Pi 4.
According to Toral, the team is getting much closer to completing the first implementation of the Vulkan driver. This latest endeavor with Quake began when Toral decided to take a break from feature development to gauge the performance of their work so far.
(Image credit: Igalia)
Toral ultimately chose to test all three VkQuake games due to their readily available source code and Linux support. If you're not familiar with VkQuake, it just like regular Quake except it relies on Vulkan for rendering instead of OpenGL.
VkQuake mainly needed input attachments and compute shaders that the Igalia team had recently completed. VkQuake 3 needed additional optional Vulkan features that Toral already had available. The project ended with all three editions running successfully on the Pi 4 using the new Vulkan V3DV driver.
I was particularly interested in getting vkQuake3 to work because the project includes both the Vulkan and the original OpenGL renderers, which was great to compare performance between both APIs.
Iago Toral
If you want to read more about the new V3DV update, check out the full blog post from Toral on the official Igalia website. In the meantime, be sure to check back here at Tom's Hardware for the latest and hottest Raspberry Pi news.
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Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.
