Steam Frame Making Use Of Zink For OpenGL On Vulkan

Valve's Steam Frame VR headset that makes use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC with Adreno graphics is using the open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver from Mesa as reported last year. For OpenGL it turns out that the Mesa Zink driver is being used on the Steam Frame for OpenGL atop the Vulkan API. While Mesa does have the Freedreno Gallium3D driver as a native OpenGL driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics, Valve decided to go with Zink for the Steam Frame for that generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team and one of the lead Zink developers confirmed the driver situation today in a blog post. Blumenkrantz wrote on his blog, "On both Android and native, it’s zink all the way down." Interesting to see them using Zink for the Steam Frame and a sign of maturity for how far this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation has come the past few years. The Steam Frame went on sale this week starting at $1059 USD.