#Phoronix Phoronix * Articles & Reviews * News Archive * Forums * Premium Ad-Free * Contact * Popular Categories * Close * * Articles & Reviews * News Archive * Forums * Premium * Contact * Categories Computers Display Drivers Graphics Cards Linux Gaming Memory Motherboards Processors Software Storage Operating Systems Peripherals * ____________________ Search Steam Frame Making Use Of Zink For OpenGL On Vulkan Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 18 September 2026 at 04:13 PM EDT. 35 Comments VALVE 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. Steam Frame 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. 35 Comments Tweet IFRAME: //www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=https://www.phoronix.com/news/ Steam-Frame-Uses-Zink&width=200&height=46&colorscheme=light&layout=butt on_count&action=like&show_faces=false&send=true Related News Valve Introduces Pyrowave Video Codec In Beta For Low Latency Streaming Valve's Steam Frame Now Available At $1059+ USD Steam Client Beta Improves Big Picture Mode, Several Linux Enhancements Steam On Linux Dips Below 4% For August SteamOS 3.9 Preview Moves To Linux 7.2, KDE Plasma 6.7 Desktop DXVK 3.1 Released With DXGI Incremental Presentation, D3D11 Buffer Render Targets About The Author Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com. 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