Mesa PanVK, the open source Vulkan driver for Arm Mali GPUs, built for Android and packaged for AdrenoTools style driver loading on the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro (Mali-G77). No root required.
The driver talks to the mali_kbase kernel driver that already ships on the
device, so there is no kernel to flash, and the system driver stays in place.
The stock driver on this device offers Vulkan 1.1. This build reports Vulkan 1.3.
I apply fixes that are not upstream in mesa, and I verify every one of them on my own hardware before I release it. Each release lists what it changes.
This is an early, experimental driver. It is not conformant, and one game has been run on it: Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, through GameNative-Mali.
This is a proof of concept, released as is, with no support. See No support.
Everything here is verified on one device: my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro, Mali-G77 MC9. It is built for that device's kernel driver and I can make no promises anywhere else. See Other devices.
Grab the latest .adpkg.zip from Releases and import it in an
app whose driver picker accepts a PanVK package on Mali.
- FauxVkTest (free, Google Play): compare this driver against your stock driver on your own device. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.faux.vktest&referrer=utm_source%3Dgithub%26utm_campaign%3Dpanvk-faux123-driver-rp4pro
- FauxVkDB: see how other devices score with stock and custom drivers. https://fauxvkdb.canonspike.com/
Nothing here is a repackaged binary from somewhere else. It is built from source.
| Source | Mesa 26.3.0-devel, from funnymdzz/mesa, a Mesa tree that adds a mali_kbase backend |
| Mali-G57 and G77 generation support | the patch series from Noysz/panvk-g99-jm |
| My patches | 29, summarized under What I added |
| Toolchain | Android NDK 27.3, meson cross build, aarch64, API level 33 |
| Packaging | .adpkg.zip: libvulkan_panfrost.so plus meta.json |
Every release names the exact build, in its release notes and in the
meta.json inside the package.
The build container, the patches, the test harnesses and a recreate guide live in a private companion repository.
Upstream PanVK expects the open source Panfrost or Panthor kernel drivers. A
retail Android handheld ships Arm's mali_kbase kernel driver, and on the Pro
the bootloader is locked, so replacing the kernel is not an option. Running PanVK
on top of mali_kbase is what makes this installable without root.
- The Mali-G77 was not in the driver's GPU table, so the driver did not start.
- Depth culling was set up wrongly for this GPU generation.
- The Android swapchain did not work on this device: the driver could not read MediaTek's buffer layout, and presenting a frame failed.
- The GPU clock stayed low, which made frames take more than twice as long. The driver now queues work the way the clock governor expects.
- A scene that submits the same commands more than once rendered black.
- Some games closed by themselves after a minute or two: a storage area for textures handed over at draw time was too small.
- A shader with many lights ran about six times slower than on the stock driver. The shader compiler loaded every light's data up front, ran out of registers, and wrote the values to memory and read them back for every pixel.
- Draws that take their parameters from a buffer drew every object with the first object's position and colour.
- Geometry shaders, tessellation, and transform feedback come from the newer Noysz patch series since v0.14.0. That series made the driver slower on this device in three ways, which I fixed: the screen got no completion signal for a frame still being drawn, so the GPU sat idle a tenth of the time; a scene that submits the same commands every frame waited for the GPU between every two passes; and work of two passes no longer ran side by side.
- A game running through Wine and DXVK showed short black dashes in its textures. The app hands the driver memory that the game writes through a cached mapping, and the GPU read it before the processor's cache had written it out. Since v0.15.0 the driver writes those lines out before each submit, for the buffers the GPU can read.
- A game ran at 0.2 frames a second (Dragon Ball Sparking Zero in Fauxium, its opening cinematic), and the kernel stopped a GPU job every five seconds. A compute shader that runs out of registers parks values in scratch memory, and on this GPU it needs at least 4 KiB of it per thread, more than the shader asks for. Since v0.16.0 the driver gives such a compute job at least 4 KiB. The cinematic now plays at 6 to 7 frames a second. The cost is about 96 MB of GPU memory for a command buffer that runs such a job.
- Blending is advertised only where the GPU's blender works since v0.17.0. The driver used to say it could blend into 32-bit float images, which this GPU can only do in the shader. An app that picks the widest float format it can blend into then drew twice the data per pixel that it draws on the stock driver, which does not advertise it. With this, my 4K HDR test scene takes 36 ms a frame against 41 ms on the stock driver (about 42 ms, drawing twice the data before).
- Smaller speed-ups: vertex data is packed without gaps, vertex outputs that nothing reads are dropped, hidden pixels are skipped earlier, and screen areas that did not change are not written again.
Everything below was measured on one device: my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro,
firmware RP4Pro_V1.0.0.167, Android 13, MediaTek Dimensity 1100, Mali-G77 MC9,
kernel 4.19.191, mali_kbase r32p1. Not rooted, bootloader locked.
The test rig is the Khronos Vulkan-Samples
app, rebuilt with AdrenoTools linked in so it loads a chosen driver directly. No
Wine, no DXVK, no Box64, no emulation. One variable: the driver .so.
- 33 offscreen graphics and compute tests pass: triangle, indexed and indirect draws, depth, stencil, blend, 4x MSAA, textures, multiple render targets, occlusion queries, copies, a compute dispatch, and fences.
- On screen, four sample scenes were run and looked at:
hello_triangle(pixel identical to the stock driver),subpasses,oit_depth_peeling, andcompute_nbody. - My feature validator proves 23 of its 26 checks on this driver. The stock driver proves 4, because it does not offer the extensions the other checks need.
Frame times against the stock Mali driver, on those four scenes: three are within
2% of stock or faster. oit_depth_peeling takes 8.0 to 9.1 ms against 7.4 ms on
stock. A fifth scene, pipeline_barriers (24 lights), takes 10.6 ms against
8.7 ms on stock since v0.13.0; it took 67 ms before.
Five scenes is a small sample. Do not read it as "as fast as stock" in general.
I own one Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. Nothing here has been run on anything else. That includes the standard Retroid Pocket 4 (Dimensity 900, Mali-G68), other Mali-G77 devices, and other firmware versions on the Pro.
Concretely, on any other device:
- The driver may not load at all. Each vendor's
mali_kbasediffers. My RG556 build needed a different job layout before a single frame rendered, so a package for one device is not safe to assume on another. - Every fix I ship was written for the hardware I have. On a different device it may be unnecessary, and it may not be harmless.
- Nothing on this page was measured on that hardware, so none of the numbers apply to it.
- I will not look into problems on hardware I do not own.
Use it if you want to, but that is the honest state of it, and you are on your own with it.
I build one driver per device I own, because that is the only way I can test it: RG556 and GameForce Ace.
Read this first: you need an app that can load it. Most driver pickers were written for Adreno and refuse or ignore a Mali package. GameNative-Mali can import it from version 1.2.1-mali.11: open Driver Manager, import the zip, then select it for a game under Graphics. That import screen is new and has had little use.
- Download
panvk_faux123_rp4pro_<version>.adpkg.zipfrom Releases. Do not unzip it. - Import it in your app's driver manager, the same way you would import a Turnip package on an Adreno device.
- Select it, then restart the container or game.
The driver has to be loaded by an app that opts in. Android does not let you replace the system Vulkan driver for arbitrary apps without root, so a normal Play Store game cannot use this.
To go back, select the system driver again. Nothing on the device is replaced.
Not tested yet: any game other than Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, window resize, present modes other than the default, and long sessions.
Not offered by this driver on the Mali-G77, so an app that needs them refuses to start rather than failing later:
Polygon mode and float depth bias representation.
Geometry shaders, tessellation shaders, and transform feedback are offered since v0.14.0. On this device they have been checked with three small tests and one sample scene, not with a conformance run and not with a game.
This is a proof of concept. I built this driver for my own device, and I am releasing it so the community can see what is possible and build on it.
- There is no support from me. I do not answer bug reports or questions.
- I do not take requests for devices I do not own. If I do not have the device, I will not develop for it.
- I do not do remote debugging or beta testing.
- I may update this driver for myself from time to time and post it here. There is no schedule and no promise.
If you want to help, support the original developers listed under Credits.
- Mesa and the Panfrost team wrote PanVK. This repository is a build of their work with patches on top. All the hard parts are theirs.
- funnymdzz for the
mali_kbasebackend this build sits on. - Noysz for the patch series that brings PanVK up on this GPU generation, developed on a Mali-G57.
- bylaws for AdrenoTools, which is the only reason a custom Vulkan driver can be loaded without root.
- Khronos for Vulkan-Samples, which turned out to be a far better driver test bench than any game.
PanVK is MIT licensed, and so are the patches in this build. See LICENSE.
The driver is compiled against Arm's mali_kbase interface headers, which are
GPL-2.0 with the Linux syscall note. That note is what allows a program to use
a kernel interface without taking on the kernel's license.
This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Arm, MediaTek, Retroid, Google, the Khronos Group, or the Mesa project.
These drivers are Mesa's PanVK with my patches on top; the Mesa developers did the hard part. If my builds help you, you can sponsor my work on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/faux123