Vulkan update: version 1.1 conformance for Raspberry Pi 4

Igalia’s Iago Toral is back with another Vulkan update.

It has been almost a year since we announced conformance for Vulkan 1.0 on Raspberry Pi 4 devices. Since then, we have been working on improving driver performance, expanding the feature set, and advancing towards Vulkan 1.1 support.

Today we are excited to announce that Khronos has just granted Vulkan 1.1 conformance to Raspberry Pi 4.

All the required driver changes for Vulkan 1.1 have already been merged in the upstream v3dv Mesa driver and will hopefully be available soon in Raspberry Pi OS.

Besides Vulkan 1.1 support, we have also implemented support for geometry shaders (which we supported only on the OpenGL ES driver) as well as more optional Vulkan features and extensions. You can see the list of supported
extensions here.

• Demo from Sascha Willems showing stereoscopic rendering using multiview (Vulkan 1.1)
• Demo from Sascha Willens showcasing geometry shaders

We have also been improving our shader compiler to produce better code in many scenarios, which should provide significant performance improvements for games and applications with expensive shading (for both Vulkan
and OpenGL drivers), such as those produced by Unreal Engine 4:

• Unreal Engine 4 Sun Temple Demo
• Unreal Engine 4 Shooter Demo

It has been great to validate the Vulkan driver with Unreal Engine 4 code and this was also very useful to drive our optimization work on the shader compiler:

Performance improvements (in %) across various Vulkan games and demos

Before you get too excited about Unreal Engine 4 games on Raspberry Pi 4, I should note that UE4 is quite expensive and performance is still not good enough for gameplay.

Finally, we also improved support for RenderDoc and GFXReconstruct, which are fantastic tools for Vulkan developers:

• RenderDoc visualizing a frame from the the Unreal Engine 4 Vehicle Demo
• GFXReconstruct playback of a RBDOOM 3 trace

We are very excited to continue improving Vulkan support for Raspberry Pi devices in the future, so stay tuned for future news!