AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 Brings Minor Improvements But No Vulkan Ray-Tracing Yet

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 Brings Minor Improvements But No Vulkan Ray-Tracing Yet

AMD engineers today published AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 as their latest open-source public code drop of their official Linux Vulkan driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDVLK-2021.Q2.2-Driver

[shmerl]

Didn't AMD release "Radeon for Linux" package with ray tracing? It's not using amdvlk?

[xpris]

Didn't AMD release "Radeon for Linux" package with ray tracing? It's not using amdvlk?

Closed source package Ray Tracing extension. Open stack still not.

[agd5f]

Different compiler backends.

[shmerl]

Different compiler backends.

I see. So AMD are still not happy with LLVM overall to keep a separate closed compiler?

[aufkrawall]

I see. So AMD are still not happy with LLVM overall to keep a separate closed compiler?

I don't think you'd ever want consumers to deal with the slow shader compile times, and also deliberately decreasing performance isn't a good idea with a competitor like Nvidia.

[shmerl]

I don't think you'd ever want consumers to deal with the slow shader compile times, and also deliberately decreasing performance isn't a good idea with a competitor like Nvidia.

llvm isn't that bad overall. Sure ACO is an improvement though. May be AMD can use that as an open option.

[aufkrawall]

llvm isn't that bad overall.

The compile times of the amdvlk-open compiler are definitely really, really bad. I haven't tested with Navi, but with Polaris it was several times worse than upstream LLVM. When a game has lots of shaders, it can take over an hour to compile them all at once (which most Vulkan and D3D12 games do) with a slow CPU & amdvlk-open. With ACO, it would be a matter of a few minutes.

[obri]

I do not understand, why
AMD needs a closed AND and an open source driver.

That sounds to me like a lot of work has to be done twice.
But why?

[stalkerg]

obri because some commercial customers still using old distro and kernel and they need provide support for them. OpenSource drivers working fine mostly for rolling base distro or with some hacks around not so old (with a custom kernel and mesa/drm and llvm).