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

[Azpegath]

At work, I'm running Windows 8 on Apple MacPro via Bootcamp, when will we see new drivers? :'( We get one to two releases per year, why is it so slow? Aren't they the same drivers, only allowing for FirePro-cards?

[bug77]

Ok, there's Vulkan support, but is it conformant Vulkan support? Last I checked, their driver wasn't passing conformance tests. And the release notes page says it supports Vulkan 1.0, while the current Vulkan version is 1.0.4 (they may be the same thing from an implementation pov, idk).

[juno]

Yes, it is - according to AMD (http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-arti...tion_16.3.aspx)

Vulkan™ Support⁽¹⁾
[...] ⁽¹⁾Product is conformant with Vulkan 1.0 Specification.

Not yet listed by Khronos (https://www.khronos.org/conformance/...rmant-products), but I'm sure it is when they claim that.

[Pecisk]

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.

Nice to get some much needed clarification regarding this. Thanks for hanging around and explaining situation.

[Pecisk]

Yes, it is - according to AMD (http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-arti...tion_16.3.aspx)

Not yet listed by Khronos (https://www.khronos.org/conformance/...rmant-products), but I'm sure it is when they claim that.

I guessed if they have released with their official driver it has passed tests. I think it is just a matter of time for Khronos web admins to get it checked and confirmed and AMD added. Good.

[Dea1993]

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.

on my notebook, opensource driver (radeon and amdgpu) has very bad 3d performance, and high temperature.
so i can't use open source driver.
i hope that in future catalyst/crimson will has better performance and better support.

I've a carrizo APU

[boltronics]

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.

Really appreciate this explanation. Thanks.

[CrystalGamma]

on my notebook, opensource driver (radeon and amdgpu) has very bad 3d performance, and high temperature.
so i can't use open source driver.
i hope that in future catalyst/crimson will has better performance and better support.

I've a carrizo APU

I have a Carrizo laptop, too, and when I bought it, it used 20W on idle (display off) … from how often the fan runs I would imagine it still does.
I suspect it's because of the dGPU (that's barely faster than the iGPU, I assume) though.

I don't have a problem with that right now, because that laptop is basically a desktop anyway.
As for the performance, I can't run any games because fullscreen stuff in XWayland regularly crashes my session …

I do long for a near future where I can use the thing on DC for more than 50min, though …

[Dea1993]

I have a Carrizo laptop, too, and when I bought it, it used 20W on idle (display off) … from how often the fan runs I would imagine it still does.
I suspect it's because of the dGPU (that's barely faster than the iGPU, I assume) though.

I don't have a problem with that right now, because that laptop is basically a desktop anyway.
As for the performance, I can't run any games because fullscreen stuff in XWayland regularly crashes my session …

I do long for a near future where I can use the thing on DC for more than 50min, though …

i've also a amd radeon r7 m360, a very useless dGPU, i never used it, because is very hot, and has a very bad performance (is not more powerful than iGPU of radeon r6 carrizo), furthermore this dGPU hasn't linux driver support (with proprietary driver).
this dGPU is useless also on windows, i've never used it, because iGPU is better.

[twriter]

on my notebook, opensource driver (radeon and amdgpu) has very bad 3d performance, and high temperature.
so i can't use open source driver.
i hope that in future catalyst/crimson will has better performance and better support.

I've a carrizo APU

Can you provide make and model number of your notebook? What distribution and version are you running? We spent a lot of effort testing the open source stack (with amdgpu) on Carrizo in Q3 of last year and it continues to be an important development and test platform for us. Quite a few of my team are using Carrizo notebooks as their primary Linux work system. I expect Carrizo notebooks to provide a good user experience overall, providing you're using a recent kernel and graphics stack. In box Ubuntu support for Carrizo would have arrived in 15.10 so anything older than that would be using the VESA driver, unless you used a PPA or built and installed the driver yourself. Ubuntu 16.04 should be even better.

Not to single you out but I see a lot of vague complaints in these forums which make it difficult for us to identify real problems or gaps in our planning. For example, "bad 3d performance" means something very different to a gamer than to an office worker. It helps a lot if you can describe the use cases that are important to you and where you feel the open source drivers are letting you down. It helps even more if you file a bug report.