The Gram Code Editor - 2026-09-18

It turns out there's a package `mesa-vulkan-drivers` that might let me have at least a little bit of hardware acceleration. I'll let you know how that works, although I really think a text editor should work with software rasterization

Well, that got me a bunch of driver-describing JSON files that vkconfig-gui understands, but it doesn't seem to consider any of them to be a Vulkan "physical device". I rebooted; no effect.

I guess I need to configure vulkan-loader to load the right one?

Hmm. Seems strange that they wouldn’t be picked up by vulkan-loader. I agree about the requirements being excessive. I do have a vague plan to work on a basic opengl-based renderer which should run OK, but the whole editor runs like a video game really and expects a lot from the GPU.

lspci reports that the i915 kernel module is in fact in use. OpenGL renderer string: Mesa Intel(R) HD Graphics 3000 (SNB GT2)

intel_vulkan.so just doesn't want to use that, for some reason

yeah software rendering could be optimized a lot. zed was mostly targeted for kinda recent macs anyway (and that's what its devs use), so they didn't care about older hardware

one simple idea is lowering the framerate when using software rendering, it's locked to 60

I have a machine with a good cpu but old gpu where software rendering works fine but it taxes the cpu too much (40-50% cpu utilization just by moving up and down in a small file)

It’s a bit funny that the selling point of zed is supposed to be the performance, but it’s all just rust plus GPU.. the code is terribly inefficient

anyway, yeah, I do want to work on improving performance and wider support for older hardware

Since there's such a thing as dxvk, I'd think someone would've made a generic emulation layer for vulkan on hardware that only supports opengl

https://dragonjoker.github.io/Ashes/

if this works, maybe it can make gram usable on my older machines

It's pretty new

Interesting, yeah that could be one way to go

No dice. I added the ICD and gram failed to start, same message as before.

Seems like this Sandy Lake "GPU" doesn't support texture views