Better performance with zink?
A long time ago I asked if someone knew how to fix the frametime spikes in sage engine games like command and conquer 3 Tiberium wars and battle for middle earth 2. The only fix was to use desktop mode.
Then today I came across a fix for another game: Digimon stories Cybersleuth. It used to work well back in the day but since Steamos 3.6 (and on bazzite for a long time now) the game just wouldn’t go past 40fps or so.
Then there was deep rock galactic survivors. Which ran fine enough, just used loads of power and had sudden framedrops.
Anyway, Digimon works fantastically when using the zink driver. So using “mesa_loader_driver_override=zink” as an environmental variable fixes the game completely.
I’m not sure what zink does exactly, other than the basic “OpenGL to vulkan” schtick that radeonsi should also be doing. It just does it better.
Now I can understand that a different way of translating an OPENGL game would fix something. But what I do not understand is how command and conquer 3, a directx game, also gets fixed in game mode when using zink. I can’t think of a reason why.
It does though. It works beautifully and I do not see any downside using zink on every game at all. Some games run way better and others run exactly as they would normally. Any reason I shouldn’t always use zink instead of radeonsi?
Edit; Worms WMD also gets fixed in gaming mode with zink. Also a directx game. Suffered from 30-40fps max on default but easily does 90 on oled steam deck with zink.
Can someone test some games as well to confirm? I would love to understand why this works, especially for the DirectX games, since they shouldn’t benefit from a different OpenGL to vulkan implementation right? Or does zink translate DX to OpenGL and then vulkan or something.
6 Replies
zink translates gl to vulkan. it is not involved with directx. what is your gpu and what proton version are you using?
Direct X wasn't really mentioned
just digimon
maybe the game could be using OpenGL
Or does zink translate DX to OpenGL and then vulkan or something.las sentence worms wmd uses dx11, c&c3tw uses dx9.0c according to pcgw
oh
then no
zink doesn't have anything to do with DirectX
under very specific conditions maybe
whe using WINED3D for Direct X
which you would be doing for games that use Direct X before 8 i think
DirectX <= 7 would be translated to OpenGL but these games are not that old
in most cases zink should do nothing