Vulkan progress report and initial impressions

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So it’s already a couple of days ago since Vulkan launched. We were one of the first non-test programs in the world to launch on Day One with a quite mature Vulkan implementation. So far it seems only ARM Mali, nVidia and Intel Broadwell Mesa drivers can handle all the features inside RetroArch’s Vulkan backend.

This is a followup to the earlier article which can be found here.

WSI XCB support

Back when RetroArch added Vulkan support on Launch Day, there was only a working Wayland implementation.

We support Vulkan over XCB now too. This means you can get Vulkan to run now on Linux with an nVidia GPU since their binary  blob driver doesn’t support Wayland.

I have tested the XCB context successfully on an Intel Ivy Bridge GPU as well. You need DRI3 support in order for this to work.

In case the Vulkan driver does not work for you on Intel, try creating the file ‘/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf. The file can be found here.

We recommend that if you have the option to choose between the two (and on some GPUs you simply might not have this option, like nVidia), that you pick Wayland over XCB and an X11 server. It’s a lot smoother.

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Day 1 Vulkan support

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Today Hans-Kristian Arntzen (also known as Themaister) sent us a big pull request giving RetroArch complete Vulkan support, the new graphics library API that has been unveiled and released to the public today.

See the pull request here.

Features/what has been ported

  • A full-featured graphics driver for Vulkan was written.
  • It should be compatible with MaterialUI/XMB and the other hardware-accelerated menu drivers that were previously GL-only.
  • Overlays should work through Vulkan. (by overlays we mean the gamepad overlays in RetroArch)
  • Font rendering should work through Vulkan.
  • Shader support. Vulkan support will mean some changes for shaders that will be unveiled later on.
  • Asynchronous GPU recording.
  • Libretro cores can be written against Vulkan as well. A test core was included for this in the repo, you can find it here.

Libretro cores that use Vulkan will require an additional header, libretro_vulkan.h.

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