Nvidia Engineer Releases Vulkan for Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi CEO and founder Eben Upton a few weeks ago Raspberry Pi 4 He announced that the work on the Vulkan driver, which is being developed for the company, is continuing and that we will have to wait a while longer. However, NVIDIA Engineer Martin Thomas has developed and released his own unofficial Vulkan driver called 'RPi-VK-Driver'.

Vulkan is actually a next-generation low-level graphics and computing API (Application Programming Interface). Vulkan stands out as an alternative to OpenGL and DirectX while aiming to provide high efficiency and cross-platform access to modern GPUs. Martin Thomas launches this new low-end for Raspberry Pi RPi-VK-Driver He had been developing his driver for two years.

RPi-VK-Driver released as low-level GPU driver

RPi-VK-Driver is a new driver that brings a subset of the Vulkan standard to devices. low level It is defined as the GPU driver. The new Vulkan driver is compatible with Broadcom VideoCore IV GPUs, which you can find in all versions before the Raspberry Pi 4, and therefore supports all devices from Raspberry Pi Zero to Model 3B+.

Thomas, who used the driver on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, Quake III Arena It was able to exceed 100 FPS in the game. Since the Broadcom VideoCore IV graphics card does not support 1080p resolution, it runs the game at 720p resolution. Thomas notes that RPi-VK-Driver offers better memory management and increased speed compared to OpenGL. It also offers support for new features like MSAA (multi-sample anti-aliasing), low-level shaders and performance counters.

Moments of running Quake III on Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+:

On your Raspberry Pi Quake III If you want to run the game, you can download the new low-level version of the game designed for mini PCs here. For more information about RPi-VK-Driver, you can visit the GitHub repository here.