Radeon Crimson 16.3 Released With Vulkan, But No Sign Yet For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon Crimson 16.3 Released With Vulkan, But No Sign Yet For Linux

Today AMD released the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3 driver (formerly known as Catalyst), but sadly the Linux driver update is not in tandem with this new driver update which now provides official Vulkan support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-Crimson-16.3-Windows

[zanny]

that this year they would be looking to sync back their Windows and Linux driver releases, that doesn't appear to be the case yet

Can they please not? Don't waste time on Catalyst. Ubuntu has already made the great decision to drop it, Arch already dropped it long ago, it is a PITA to use on Debian, etc. The entire community is behind AMD dropping Catalyst entirely and just focusing on Mesa, and they absolutely should do that.

Any resources that would have gone into maintaining Catalyst on Linux should really be spent making Gallium match it in performance and features on Windows.

[xeekei]

Can they please not? Don't waste time on Catalyst. Ubuntu has already made the great decision to drop it, Arch already dropped it long ago, it is a PITA to use on Debian, etc. The entire community is behind AMD dropping Catalyst entirely and just focusing on Mesa, and they absolutely should do that.

Any resources that would have gone into maintaining Catalyst on Linux should really be spent making Gallium match it in performance and features on Windows.

Most of the code of Catalyst is shared between Windows and Linux, so you wouldn't gain resources by simply dropping it. They have also said numerous times why they can't just drop the proprietary driver over night.

[rakah]

I'm not going to quote the developer directly, but to paraphrase one of the AMDGPU developers on this forum pointed out that they expected Vulkan to be released later in the year and are not ready. They're in the middle of a transition from RadeonSI to AMDGPU and while they know how to implement Vulkan, the driver as a whole still needs quite a bit of work.

I'm not sure why the Vulkan implementation needs to be closed source at first though. Intel already has a working open source Vulkan driver and because it's open source we can see the commit log and monitor progress. With AMD we don't know if the Vulkan driver exists and if it will show up in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, etc.

[vortex]

I'm not going to quote the developer directly, but to paraphrase one of the AMDGPU developers on this forum pointed out that they expected Vulkan to be released later in the year and are not ready. They're in the middle of a transition from RadeonSI to AMDGPU and while they know how to implement Vulkan, the driver as a whole still needs quite a bit of work.

I'm not sure why the Vulkan implementation needs to be closed source at first though. Intel already has a working open source Vulkan driver and because it's open source we can see the commit log and monitor progress. With AMD we don't know if the Vulkan driver exists and if it will show up in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, etc.

While, I agree, a open sourced Vulkan code path would really be nice, the current Vulkan drivers on windows works with all the Vulkan tests I have tried, so, not sure what 'quite a bit of work' is meant here.
Maybe for linux?

[Pecisk]

We know they are moving to AMDGPU, Vulkan will sit on top of it. Nice to see Windows driver officially released, hopefully it gets approved by test suite.

[agd5f]

I'm not going to quote the developer directly, but to paraphrase one of the AMDGPU developers on this forum pointed out that they expected Vulkan to be released later in the year and are not ready. They're in the middle of a transition from RadeonSI to AMDGPU and while they know how to implement Vulkan, the driver as a whole still needs quite a bit of work.

I'm not sure why the Vulkan implementation needs to be closed source at first though. Intel already has a working open source Vulkan driver and because it's open source we can see the commit log and monitor progress. With AMD we don't know if the Vulkan driver exists and if it will show up in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, etc.

I'm not sure who you are paraphrasing, but I don't think AMD ever said that. The Vulkan driver is working fine on Linux. As we've said before, we have internal validation cycles related to releases and the Linux one did not line up with the Vulkan announcement. As to why it's closed source initially, the Vulkan driver is shared across OSes. With the catalyst transition to amdgpu, finalizing of the Vulkan API, and various other projects, we have not been focusing on the review of the code for public release in the short term. Some of the code for supporting other OSes cannot be open sourced for example and needs to be reviewed such that we can easily release the Linux code publicly and still keep things in sync with our internal trees relatively easily.

[juno]

sorry, wrote bs here...

[asdfblah]

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/857070-ubuntu-is-deprecating-fglrx-catalyst-in-16-04-lts?p=857202#post857202

[rakah]

I'm not sure who you are paraphrasing, but I don't think AMD ever said that. The Vulkan driver is working fine on Linux. As we've said before, we have internal validation cycles related to releases and the Linux one did not line up with the Vulkan announcement. As to why it's closed source initially, the Vulkan driver is shared across OSes. With the catalyst transition to amdgpu, finalizing of the Vulkan API, and various other projects, we have not been focusing on the review of the code for public release in the short term. Some of the code for supporting other OSes cannot be open sourced for example and needs to be reviewed such that we can easily release the Linux code publicly and still keep things in sync with our internal trees relatively easily.

Thanks for clearing that up. Completely understand where that is coming from.