As of yet, AMD has not delivered the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver originally slated to arrive early this year, instead relying on their current proprietary driver. That has not stopped a team of plucky programmers from creating RADV, utilizing the existing AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end and Intel's work with Mesa NIR intermediate representation to pass to LLVM IR. You won't get Gallium3D support, ironically RADV is too close to the metal for that to work.
Phoronix just wrapped up testing of the new driver, looking at performance for The Talos Principal and DOTA 2, contrasting the open source driver with the closed source AMDGPU-PRO. RADV is not quite 4k ready but at lower resolutions it proves very competitive.
"With word coming out last week that the RADV open-source Vulkan driver can now render Dota 2 correctly, I've been running some tests the past few days of this RADV Vulkan driver compared to AMD's official (but currently closed-source) Vulkan driver bundled with the AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver."
Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:
- Windows 10 vs. Linux Radeon Software Performance @ Phoronix
- PowerColor Red Devil RX 480 8GB Review @ OCC
- XFX Radeon RX 460 Double Dissipation @ [H]ard|OCP
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition Review @ Neoseeker
I see lots of artifacting
I see lots of artifacting [black blobs]
If you read the article you
If you read the article you can see that this is a super new community developed driver in a pretty early stage. Rendering is correct on DOTA2 but has errors on the Talos Principal. There is also an issue with full screen rendering.
Overall, it is incredibly promising and was developed so quickly (using some existing Intel and AMD Mesa bits) that AMD may consider shifting gears and just support this effort for their open source Vulkan driver rather than facing the large rewrite required to open source their proprietary Vulkan driver without legal issues.
If AMD would just release the
If AMD would just release the source of only the parts that their legal department said where OK to release and just note what proprietary calls they make for the other methods not considered legal. I’m sure they could list any API function/method calls for the proprietary parts without any proprietary code provided and let the community fill in the actual code with some open source equivalents!
I’d think that maybe M$ and other proprietary OS/API interests are exerting some nefarious pressure on AMD to slow things down for open source Linux/Vulkan AMD driver development. This also includes any pressure on the Khronos group itself for the releasing of any necessary Vulkan API code to the open source community.
This open source community developing a truly open source Vulkan API driver software stack should approach AMD and ask them if they could release the open parts of the AMD Vulkan driver stack that may assist in the open source community’s development of a Vulkan driver for AMD’s GPUs.
I’d really like to get a new Linux OS based laptop that had decent open source AMD Vulkan driver support before 2020! Then I could get a monopoly free laptop with a Zen/Polaris APU option that runs Linux/Vulkan at acceptable levels for my graphics needs.
Well, in the forum comments
Well, in the forum comments linked at the end of the article, there there is discussion from John Bridgman from AMD discussing that. It isn’t Microsoft slowing things down but the difficulty in extracting a usable open source linux driver out of the shared cross-api / cross-platform code of their current driver.
He also mentioned being aware that focusing on the easy parts (to help the Radv driver) would be a good idea. I’m guessing that, by the time the AMD Vulkan driver is open sourced in 6-12 months, radv will already be in a state that it doesn’t matter that much (as long as the two guys keep working on it and get some official support).
What is cool is that AMD is doing a great job. . nVidia still has a more performant GL driver but AMD is making great strides.
I hope they can get this
I hope they can get this worked out and get a streamlined Linux/Vulkan graphic driver and API software stack out there. AMD needs to Know this, I’m very interested in getting a Zen/Polaris APU based laptop but I’ll give up on laptops entirely if I can not get a Zen/Polaris, Linux OS based OEM made laptop! I will never purchase a laptop with windows 10 factory installed, I’ll keep using my windows 7 laptops and converting them over to Linux when 2020 gets here. If AMD really wants to sell Zen then AMD is going to have to get really good Linux OS support for more than just its Zen Server SKUs, I will avoid any PC/Laptop hardware that comes with windows 10.
AMD needs to partner with a Linux OS based laptop maker this time around and make sure there are some Linux OS based Zen/Polaris APU laptops that have full Linux/Vulkan support before 2020. AMD does not realize how much business is going to be out there from people looking to get away from M$’s windows 10 walled garden from hell!
It will be decades till
It will be decades till enough people understand how important it is for OS and drivers to be open source.