AMDVLK 2020.Q3.1 Vulkan Driver Brings More Performance Tuning

[theriddick]

Well it would only benefit Vulkan and OpenGL under Windows, the DirectX component would still need to be opened up which apparently is REALLY HARD to do?

I do agree, AMD should just use the Linux OGL and VLK open-source projects under Windows, the only issue might be the compiler could be different, I dunno.

BTW, according to many, the current windows OGL and VLK drivers kinda suck a bit. However AMD has their whole elaborate windows control panel hooked into it a fair bit.
What they could do is offer a open-source windows driver line (not instead of) that is based off Linux projects, that be neat.

[smitty3268]

whats wrong in porting a mesa driver to windows?

Nothing, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about moving ACO out of mesa.

ACO is tied very closely with NIR, for example, which is integrated very tightly into Mesa. So how does AMD start using it for, let's say, their DX12 driver?

Pulling all that out of Mesa and into the drivers they need to use it would be a massive undertaking. Not impossible, but it's a big job. It's the same thing they are running into now trying to use llvm for their new engine rather than their older proprietary compiler. LLVM is designed to be a bit more friendly towards this type of embedding, though, while ACO wasn't.

Or else you are talking about moving their existing drivers like DX12 into Mesa, which again... Big task you are asking them to do. Not likely to happen, for a lot of different reasons.

[arQon]

BTW, according to many, the current windows OGL and VLK drivers kinda suck a bit. However AMD has their whole elaborate windows control panel hooked into it a fair bit.

That has to be the kindest description of AMD's windows driver that I've ever seen.
It's incredibly flaky - or at least so on Navi. It will hardlock the entire machine even in 2D mode, completely at random AFAICT. Then it'll work fine for a week under heavy 3D load, then hardlock the machine again just when starting a game, or in 2D mode, or etc. Rinse and repeat every few days.

Given the the choice between that, and a stable driver without the "elaborate" (to put it mildly!) control panel, I'd rather have the stability even if it came with a 10% performance hit. The windows driver is *out of control* with all the gimmicks in it nowadays: massive amounts of monitoring, obnoxious (and more often than not, wrong) "suggestions", a freaking WEB BROWSER - it makes systemd look restrained... :P

I realise that the UI devs are very much not the "real" driver devs, but when you see AMD not only do things THAT stupid with the driver but also continue to just ignore all the devastating bugs in there for YEARS on end (they're supposedly finally putting some effort into that now, at least) it makes a pretty terrible impression.

Anyway, I should get back on topic before this gets ranty...

whats wrong in porting a mesa driver to windows?

You lose the 800 Special Hacks that have been added to the driver over the past 20 years to deal with games that are either underperformant on some cards for various reasons, or don't quite work properly, and so on. That's the killer, even before you get into the logistics of trying to port the driver to a different OS in the first place, and whatever other functionality is in the current driver but not in Mesa (multi-monitor stuff or etc: I don't mean the control panel / relive / etc garbage, but things that are actually useful). It's a massive amount of work, for something that would be a huge step backwards.** So why on earth would anyone want to do it?

(** Aside from, you know, the whole crashing thing :P).

[qarium]

You lose the 800 Special Hacks that have been added to the driver over the past 20 years to deal with games that are either underperformant on some cards for various reasons, or don't quite work properly, and so on. That's the killer, even before you get into the logistics of trying to port the driver to a different OS in the first place, and whatever other functionality is in the current driver but not in Mesa (multi-monitor stuff or etc: I don't mean the control panel / relive / etc garbage, but things that are actually useful). It's a massive amount of work, for something that would be a huge step backwards.** So why on earth would anyone want to do it?

(** Aside from, you know, the whole crashing thing :P).

"That has to be the kindest description of AMD's windows driver that I've ever seen.
It's incredibly flaky - or at least so on Navi. It will hardlock the entire machine even in 2D mode, completely at random AFAICT. Then it'll work fine for a week under heavy 3D load, then hardlock the machine again just when starting a game, or in 2D mode, or etc. Rinse and repeat every few days."

it really sounds like you give answers to yourself. my Vega64 with mesa 20.1 on debian11 has no Crashing problem. the windows people are just fun they claim they do not need to port linux drivers to windows to get a stable system but then they have crash the system every day.

[Aisyk]

RADV is the Vulkan backend developed my the MESA devs, not AMD (though I think AMD devs have contributed to it). It's installed by default and what anyone not using AMDGPU-Pro is using to play their games unless they went out of their way to install AMDVLK or AMDVLK-Pro (more on that below).

AMDVLK is the Vulkan backed developed by AMD devs directly.

AMDGPU-Pro is AMD's proprietary driver and is only supported on a very minimal of Linux operating systems. Ubuntu, SUSE, Cent, & Red Hat. It includes a version of AMDVLK that the community tends to refer to as AMDVLK-Pro and it's possible to install AMDVLK-Pro pretty much anywhere. I recommend referencing the Arch AUR amdvlk-pro packages for how (because I don't remember the steps off the top of my head).

As far as the version goes, that varies widely by distribution and isn't something to easily document and keep updated. Ones like Arch and Fedora will be running the latest version of what's available as soon as it is ready where as Ubuntu and SUSE users might have to wait quite a while to get what I'm calling the latest version for the previously mentioned Arch and Fedora. On those older distributions it can be beneficial to run the AMDGPU-Pro packages (if possible) since it'll likely be more up to date. That said, some distributions, like Ubuntu with their HWE repos, are taking an initiative to keep the drivers more up to date (I have to reckon because old drivers means gamers will go elsewhere and gamers seem to be a significant portion of Linux desktop users at home).

And all three of the Vulkan backends can be installed at the same time. All you have to do is launch programs with the right environment variable to change it from the default used to whatever else.

Thanks !

[Aisyk]

whats wrong in porting a mesa driver to windows?

Maybe this ?

https://fdossena.com/?p=mesa/index.frag

[mphuZ]

BTW, according to many, the current windows OGL and VLK drivers kinda suck a bit.

Give a list of these "many". There are no problems with the Vulkan driver on Windows.

[theriddick]

Give a list of these "many". There are no problems with the Vulkan driver on Windows.

Allot of people been complaining about black screen, reboots, crashes. The OGL drivers under Windows perform allot worse then under Linux the several times I've tried them.

I generally read peoples feedback on 5700 related forums now and again because I want to know where their driver stability is at. It seems NVIDIA is doing better with Vulkan under windows atm, which is quite ironic but whatever.

[user1]

Allot of people been complaining about black screen, reboots, crashes. The OGL drivers under Windows perform allot worse then under Linux the several times I've tried them.

I generally read peoples feedback on 5700 related forums now and again because I want to know where their driver stability is at. It seems NVIDIA is doing better with Vulkan under windows atm, which is quite ironic but whatever.

What you've described here are generally issues with AMD's Windows drivers on Navi. It has nothing to do with AMD's Vulkan driver specifically. I have used AMD's Vulkan driver on Windows with my RX 580 and had absolutely no issues. AMD's OpenGL driver on Windows does perform a lot worse than RadeonSI.