Mesa Vulkan Branch Published For Intel Linux Support

[bridgman]

Is there any ETA for amdgpu work being finished for certain release milestone? Will that milestone have Vulkan driver (presumably binary only atm) added? I see you guys have incredibly lot on your plate so curious minds wonder.

We have internal "most likely" milestones but don't think we have identified a public date yet:


Yes, the first driver will include Vulkan in binary form.

[zanny]

Why four years? The next LTS is only two years away. And I doubt most gamers restrict themselves to LTSs - I can't be bothered to recompute the stats but when I last looked at 0 A.D. players some years ago, there were 4x more on newer non-LTS versions of Ubuntu than the last LTS. It'll still take maybe a year for Ubuntu 16.10 to get reasonably widespread adoption, but a year's okay.

I'm talking in more the worst case scenario, but if 18.04 releases with Mir and/or Unity 8 and it turns out to be a trainwreck, a lot of people may stay on 16.04 for its 5 year life cycle. We also don't know how well Kubuntu et al will handle the Wayland transition and how that will work throughout the Ubuntu distro family.

I imagine a lot of gamers do not just stay on the LTS, but when you are making a game or porting one you cannot target just hardcore gamers - especially on Linux, there are just too few of us to justify development. Which means you can't realistically release Vulkan-only Linux titles until you are sure you have enough people who can actually run your game and thus buy it to recoup the development costs, and as long as a huge portion of Linux market share is on an Ubuntu LTS, developers have to take into consideration that any non-hardcore gamers that might want to play their game would be unable to if it were using Vulkan instead of OpenGL for quite a while.

PS: Thanks bridgeman for the clarification, I'm just being a pessimist negative nancy until we see the results of all this hype actually pay off.

[haagch]

zanny haswell is supported, even ivy bridge is!

Well, so far no single Vulkan example runs on Ivy Bridge and the Vulkan SDK demos hang the GPU, but it will work in the future.

[bridgman]

PS: Thanks bridgeman for the clarification, I'm just being a pessimist negative nancy until we see the results of all this hype actually pay off.

Yep, that's fair.

I just wish we only had to live up to our own hype (which has always been fairly non-hype-y) and not the hype from everyone else

[blackout23]

Yep, that's fair.

I just wish we only had to live up to our own hype (which has always been fairly non-hype-y) and not the hype from everyone else

At least the AMD Windows Vulkan driver seems to be very nice and sees some massive games over OpenGL despite Talos Principle still being an alpha port. The Fury X even overtakes the 980 Ti with Vulkan. Hope we can sees similar improvements on Linux.

http://www.computerbase.de/2016-02/v...los-principle/

HHYYYYPPPEE!!

Kind of interesting that an alpha Vulkan game on beta drivers is already faster than the OpenGL version even on NVIDIA. Doesn't speak for OpenGL.

[timofonic]

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...ry/000201.html



No Mir support, very interesting

Great scheduling, these great FOSS companies really care about FOSS

What about Vulkan for CAD, CAM and 3D modelling apps?

What about Blender? FreeCAD? OpenScad?

Well, so far no single Vulkan example runs on Ivy Bridge and the Vulkan SDK demos hang the GPU, but it will work in the future.

Nothing to lose. There's a shitty past and present, things can only change to better...

Future? I'm skeptic about that concept

[smitty3268]

Nice to get some clarity here, thanks.

Is there any ETA for amdgpu work being finished for certain release milestone? Will that milestone have Vulkan driver (presumably binary only atm) added? I see you guys have incredibly lot on your plate so curious minds wonder.

bridgman won't tell you any real dates, but FYI Michael has been hinting it will probably happen during the Polaris launch, which makes a lot of sense. And I think the rumors for that launch are roughly June.

[smitty3268]

Yes, the first driver will include Vulkan in binary form.

Will the initial Vulkan drivers require running Catalyst as the GL drivers? Or can you run the proprietary Vulkan drivers along with the Mesa GL drivers?

[tomtomme]

All major platforms? What about apple? Any word from them? I really have to read up I guess....

Is metalVK for real? Michael, this should be worth a post

[bridgman]

bridgman won't tell you any real dates, but FYI Michael has been hinting it will probably happen during the Polaris launch, which makes a lot of sense. And I think the rumors for that launch are roughly June.

We're thinking about putting out an earlier "pipe cleaner" driver (so very early installer/packaging bits and first time running the amdgpu hybrid stack through QA) to get Vulkan out for Linux users. That's why the dates are up in the air.

Will the initial Vulkan drivers require running Catalyst as the GL drivers? Or can you run the proprietary Vulkan drivers along with the Mesa GL drivers?

The package will come with Catalyst GL (and CL AFAIK) but should be fairly hackable. Obviously if you swap out Catalyst GL for Mesa GL then things like GL/CL interop will probably stop working.