RADV Vulkan Driver Support For Multiple Devices

Written by Michael Larabel in Vulkan on 16 January 2017 at 03:52 PM EST. 11 Comments
VULKAN
Open-source driver developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has posted a patch for allowing the open-source Radeon Mesa Vulkan driver (RADV) to support multiple devices.

This patch shifts around just under 100 lines of code and allows for multiple Radeon GPUs to be enumerated as physical devices with Vulkan, rather than being bound to a single GPU with the current driver.

This is basically about allowing multiple Radeon GPUs to be exposed each as a physical Vulkan device via the RADV driver. This isn't about any type of SLI/CrossFire type driver magic as with the Vulkan API the work of rendering with multiple devices is punted into the space of the application / game engine for deciding how to deal with multiple devices when available. Though with the next "Vulkan-Next" (Vulkan 1.1?) release we are expecting to see better multi-GPU support, similar to what is offered by Microsoft's Direct3D 12.


So today with this patch you'll simply have RADV support for multiple physical Radeon GPUs. Still, a nice step forward and great to see all the work being invested into RADV by multiple parties outside of AMD.

Update - The work is already now in Mesa Git for Mesa 17.0.
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