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,
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

— Martin Thomas (@0martint) June 19, 2020

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