Intel Vulkan Driver Split Happens - "HASVK" Introduced For Older Gen7/Gen8 Graphics

[Eirikr1848]

Good bit about this split, hasvk will only advertise vulkan 1.1 on gen8, 1.0 on gen 7.5 and no vulkan on gen 7.
And as gen9+ fully implements vulkan 1.2 and 1.3 it makes docs/features easier to parse. Now someone at intel also needs to make sure that document adds the new driver and that it is up to date..

Yo, thank you. I got my Dell D630 going with the original 965 graphics (Gen 7) wondering which Vulkan extensions would be supported. Definitely is Gen 7.5/8 not Gen7/8.

Thanks for clarifying!

[agd5f]

Northern Islands did support virtual addresses in hardware just fine AFAIK. The only problem was AMD never enabled it by default because they moved on to working on Southern Islands support before getting to that.

And while it would have been complex to get working on Evergreen, I don't think it would have required a huge performance problem emulating it. But I don't know all the details involved with that, so I won't pretend to know for sure. Just be aware that some things can be emulated perfectly fine, with no issues. Not everything is a problem.

GPU virtual memory support is just one part. While cayman technically had it, it was only added for validation efforts in preparation for SI; it was never intended for production. Despite that, we attempted to enable it on Linux if it could have been made to work reliably, but ultimately that was not possible. The other major hardware feature that is missing in hardware on pre-GCN hardware is resource descriptors in memory. As I've said before, neither feature is a strict requirement, but it makes the implementation much harder. Someone could certainly make a stab at it. The existing open source OpenGL drivers and hardware documentation available as a guide for those that are interested. AMD developers are also available to answer questions and review patches.