Feral Adds New Capability To Intel's Vulkan Mesa Driver

[schmidtbag]

Our (Intel's) Vulkan driver is conformant.

The patches from Feral implement an optional feature. We're very excited to receive patches from them.

Haha well in that case, I'm not sure why radv isn't supported either. Regardless, still nice to see progress.

[Zan Lynx]

Conformant and complete are two different things.

If your software isn't "complete" once it meets spec then where does it end? Must a Vulkan driver evolve until it can send email, so it can be really, truly, for sure, fully complete?

[VikingGe]

Bring on Rise of Tomb Raider. I've just finished TR2013.

That would be amazing, especially because it has a very good Dx12 renderer - one that actually boosts performance quite a bit (at least on my system).

[starshipeleven]

If your software isn't "complete" once it meets spec then where does it end?

It ends when the hardware is exploited 100% (ideally), or in the real life, when the software has an acceptable performance (given the hardware's own limitations).

[mattst88]

Conformant and complete are two different things.

No software is ever complete.

[starshipeleven]

No software is ever complete.

Drivers can be complete.

[oooverclocker]

Wow, I really love Feral Interactive <3. It looks like 2017 will be the milestone that the video games industry treasures the ability to solve their issues by contributing to the public, shared OSS ecosystem, and I can't await the huge boost in our market share and the adoption of SteamOS and Steam on Linux.

The dream to make community based OSS the main resource for the IT evolution of mankind, even for end users on desktop systems, seems to come true some day. The idea to share and improve one platform collaboratively is just too great to be unsuccessful.

[smitty3268]

No software is ever complete.

Quite true, and yet i think it's reasonable to equate a "complete" vulkan driver with one that exposes the same hardware features that the OpenGL driver does (within reason).

In that way, you can't say it's complete before the driver supports tessellation shaders, fast clears, etc. By "within reason," i mean that you can skip any feature you are intentionally not wanting to expose. By limiting it to features in the GL driver, you have a well-defined limit that doesn't include fancy new work on the hardware that hasn't been done before. I suspect Intel is actually getting quite close to this. I'm not entirely clear how much is left post-17.0.

However, in the context of this patch, what "complete" clearly means is "supports all the extensions Feral needs for their upcoming Vulkan game." Which I'm guessing the NVidia and AMD proprietary drivers do, leaving the Intel driver as an obvious place to help out (which is great).


Passing conformance tests doesn't apply in either case. That just tells you if your driver is working correctly or not.

[indepe]

There was a mix of "complete" and "compliant" already before "conformant" was used to clarify that the added feature is optional. Of course such a clarification is informative and worthwhile.

[theghost]

Wow, impressive.
Instead of waiting until someone else implements that feature, Feral is doing it themselves.
It's nice to see how they contribute back.