Mesa Git Now Allows Building The Open-Source AMD RADV Vulkan Driver On Windows

[leipero]

How is it better than RadeonSI?
Maybe you're talking about some professional workloads which work better with AMD's proprietary OpenGL implementation? At least in gaming workloads, its performance is pretty underwhelming. Just look at r/AMD and see how many complain about abysmal performance in Minecraft or emulators. Then, some of them try to run the same things on Linux and have their jaws dropped because of how well it suddenly runs. Heck, RadeonSI even beats Nvidia's OpenGL in some cases.
Can you give me an example of why Windows OpenGL is better than RadeonSI in your experience?

Well, that's all circumstantial evidence, I saw all those posts and claims, I yet have to see one concrete example with proof for such claims, I personally saw none (that doesn't mean I'm right ofc.). From the personal experience, at that time, fglrx was way beter than Mesa, for example, GNOME Shell worked flawlessly with fglrx, using mesa would result in some occasional stutters that are present to this day on very different hardware etc., in fact, when fglrx was dropped, I was very disappointed because it impacts even 2D/DE experience, and not for the better.

I never tested newer AMD proprietary drivers, I might as well try, and provide actual proof to support or deny those claims.

[fafreeman]

To be able to actually run RADV on Windows, someone will have to write a new winsys backend for it for communication with the Windows kernel driver. I kinda doubt someone is willing to do that. I'm still curious what is the purpose of compiling RADV on Windows.
Speaking of actually running a Mesa driver on WIndows, I think it would make much more sense with RadeonSI, considering the poor performance of the WIndows GL driver.

i've been feeling like for awhile that amd themselves want to stop being the primary developers for the api libraries. offload that to someone else and someone else being the open source community. i've even see windows users bring up mesa to amd on /r/amd because of how well it performs. especially with regards to opengl since amd is a joke with their own opengl performance in windows. hell mesa's opengl performance rivals that of nvidia's as we have seen with benchmarking.

i don't know how they can do this with directx. they probably would stay the primary developer for that, but for open api's like opengl and vulkan, i really don't see the reason why they bother being the primary developer of a closed off binary for it. their work with mesa has been great and they be better off using mesa as their common library for opengl + vulkan.

it seems like amd's resources are cut thin and having to be the primary supporter of everything has been a strain on them. dx9, dx10, dx11, dx12, opengl 2,3,4, vulkan, and then professional applications. its a lot on their back to support by themselves. nvidia gets away with it because they are primarily a gpu company.

[smitty3268]

Well, that's all circumstantial evidence, I saw all those posts and claims, I yet have to see one concrete example with proof for such claims, I personally saw none (that doesn't mean I'm right ofc.). From the personal experience, at that time, fglrx was way beter than Mesa, for example, GNOME Shell worked flawlessly with fglrx, using mesa would result in some occasional stutters that are present to this day on very different hardware etc., in fact, when fglrx was dropped, I was very disappointed because it impacts even 2D/DE experience, and not for the better.

I never tested newer AMD proprietary drivers, I might as well try, and provide actual proof to support or deny those claims.

On Windows it's long been common knowledge that AMD's GL drivers are slow, and if you cared about OpenGL you got NVidia. They were always 20-30% faster than AMD compared to what you'd see from DirectX games.

That said, it hardly mattered because there are virtually no OpenGL games on Windows. Doom (maybe vulkan?). No Man's Sky (now vulkan). x-plane? (also now vulkan). Minecraft was the main one, I guess.

Tests on Linux have radeonsi performance on par with nvidia (or actually better than for the last year or so, since nvidia has started focusing more on vulkan).

[Blzut3]

From what I can tell people have been claiming the Linux OpenGL driver is faster than Windows since the March 2018 article which seems to be the last time Michael tested it. In there Linux was either slightly behind or way ahead. Would be cool to see an update with the latest drivers since its been over 3 years.

[Daktyl198]

I would love to run AMD Mesa drivers on Windows less for performance, even though I play plenty of games on that machine, but for stability. I've had more random driver resets and crashes on my Windows boot than I ever have on Linux since AMDGPU became a thing. I would love to be able to install Mesa drivers and trust that they'll be rock solid stable and not prone to random, weird glitches.

Alas, it would never happen.

[leipero]

smitty3268 I don't have any data to either support or reject those claims, I can however say that what is the common claim (AMD Windows OpenGL < Mesa) is not the experience I personally have.

[mphuZ]

It will be interesting to see what ultimately happens and if/when RADV is able to actually work on Windows and whether it can possess any interesting advantages compared to the existing proprietary AMD Vulkan Windows driver.

Why? WHY?

No one on Windows needs this driver. Don't need this driver fragmentation on this system. They can't restore order at home, so they also push all the garbage to other systems.

[oiaohm]

No one on Windows needs this driver. Don't need this driver fragmentation on this system. They can't restore order at home, so they also push all the garbage to other systems.

Not exactly sure of that thinking there are different benchmarks showing up that Linux native amd vulkan is turning out faster than windows. Porting the RADV to Windows could answer if it upper library stuff or deeper kernel stuff.

[smitty3268]

smitty3268 I don't have any data to either support or reject those claims, I can however say that what is the common claim (AMD Windows OpenGL < Mesa) is not the experience I personally have.

I'm not sure how you are directly comparing the windows OpenGL driver to a linux one. That seems like it would be difficult to do - are you bringing something like WINE into the picture at the same time?

I can only say that there were dozens of tests done in the past that showed poor AMD OpenGL performance on windows. However, that was all years ago. OpenGL is practically dead these days on windows, to the point where I couldn't even find any recent comparisons done over the last few years because literally no one cares about it.

I strongly suspect nothing has changed over the years, because as I said - OpenGL is dead and AMD was happy to let it die. But technically I suppose it's possible things have changed more recently and no one noticed.

I did find a couple reports similar to this:
https://www.pcgamer.com/no-mans-sky-...n-api-support/
https://www.pcgamer.com/doom-benchma...n-vs-opengl/2/

Basically noting that on AMD cards the game was terrible under GL and matched expectations with Nvidia after moving to Vulkan, while nvidia did well under both APIs.

I believe Phoronix has plenty of articles showing that NVidia OpenGL performance is similar between windows and linux, and that radeonsi performance on linux is on par with the nvidia drivers, so you can extend that to the results above. There are also older tests comparing fglrx which show it to be pretty bad on linux, and it supposedly shared the same codebase with the windows drivers.

You could argue that those are individual game problems with the windows drviers, but when those are pretty much the only GL games that's all we can really look at.

[MrCooper]

Can somebody explain me rationale and motivation of this effort?

The author of these changes has refused to explain this, multiple times.