In a recent guest post on the Raspberry Pi website, Iago Toral from Igalia a Free Software consultancy, revealed that V3DV Vulkan Mesa driver for the Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 400, and Compute Module 4, which both use the BCM2711 SoC, has been declared as conformant with Vulkan 1.0 specifications.
Tested on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Raspberry Pi OS and Linux kernel 5.4.51, the V3DV driver passed Conformance Test Suite 100,000 tests. This marks a milestone in the project but it by no means the end, as Toral mentions in the post:
"Vulkan 1.0 conformance is a major milestone in bringing Vulkan to Raspberry Pi, but it isn’t the end of the journey. Our team continues to work on all fronts to expand the Vulkan feature set, improve performance, and fix bugs. So stay tuned for future Vulkan updates!"
Over the past year, we have seen Toral's work progress from simple geometric shapes to rendered jungles and cathedrals, all using the Raspberry Pi 4. Toral also saw fit to "test" the hardware with a few games of Quake 3.
If you fancy testing it for yourself, then you have two options. Download and build the latest driver for yourself via the official Mesa repository, or you can install an older (at the time of writing) version via PiKiss and automate the installation, along with Quake 3.
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Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".
