AMDVLK 2021.Q2.6 Vulkan Driver Released - Removes Pre-Polaris / Pre-Raven Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMDVLK 2021.Q2.6 Vulkan Driver Released - Removes Pre-Polaris / Pre-Raven Support

Following the announcement this week that AMD is dropping pre-Polaris GPU support (or pre-Raven Ridge support for APUs) from their mainline Radeon Software driver on Windows, the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver has also now similarly discontinued that older GPU support...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDVLK-2021.Q2.6

[tildearrow]

Have a coffee...

Aside from retiring the older GPU support, AMDVLK 2021.Q2.6 also now supprots using the raw monotic clock for EXT_calibrated_timestamps, fixes memory leaks during Vulkan CTS runs, and also has work on VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state2 driver handling.

[Aryma]

so next few years they will kill RX 500 series too ?
i was planning to buy rx580 or 400 series look like i need to buy a GPU with some pricing for a car in the middle of Africa to display something with my CPU without igpu

[skeevy420]

so next few years they will kill RX 500 series too ?
i was planning to buy rx580 or 400 series look like i need to buy a GPU with some pricing for a car in the middle of Africa to display something with my CPU without igpu

I hope not. I had to dip into my new GPU funds for more storage yesterday in anticipation for Win11. Win10 is on a 15 year old 2TB HDD that is starting to give SMART warnings so it jumped to the top of the "upgrade me" list.

Got 5TB for $202. A 1TB NVME for the OS and a 4TB HDD for storage. I think Amazon messed up on the HDD's price and me buying it alerted them to it. Literally the second after I bought it the price jumped from $94 to $131. I'll finally have all my operating systems on SSD or better so I'm happy.

4TB for $104 after tax

It might be the Dark Ages for GPUs but it sure is the Golden Ages for Storage.

[bple2137]

Can somebody explain what's the point of that driver? It never really worked for me on Polaris. Installing it straight up breaks most of games or other apps I use. I never even successfully used that for once and I need to make sure it's uninstalled or I'll be wasting time trying to figure out what broke my graphics.

so next few years they will kill RX 500 series too ?
i was planning to buy rx580 or 400 series look like i need to buy a GPU with some pricing for a car in the middle of Africa to display something with my CPU without igpu

I wouldn't worry. It's just the crappy AMD user-space library that no one uses. RADV will probably keep support for Polaris and even older for a long long time.

[xpris]

Can somebody explain what's the point of that driver? It never really worked for me on Polaris. Installing it straight up breaks most of games or other apps I use. I never even successfully used that for once and I need to make sure it's uninstalled or I'll be wasting time trying to figure out what broke my graphics.



I wouldn't worry. It's just the crappy AMD user-space library that no one uses. RADV will probably keep support for Polaris and even older for a long long time.

Well, I maintain AMDVLK package for my distro. For most of time it works fine. You know, i have it installed mostly for tests but I use it for gamming too. I know some games that work better on AMDVLK than on RADV, also for some from my steam library offer better max FPS on RADV but AMDVLK offer better low frames or average frames.
Also some games like POE not working on my RADV but works fine on AMDVLK.
But yes, for most of games RADV should be better but still AMDVLK can be a good option to check if game work better in one or the other. I do that.

[skeevy420]

Can somebody explain what's the point of that driver? It never really worked for me on Polaris. Installing it straight up breaks most of games or other apps I use. I never even successfully used that for once and I need to make sure it's uninstalled or I'll be wasting time trying to figure out what broke my graphics.

AMD contractual obligations. A stack they have full control over. Those are the best reasons I've heard in support of AMDVLK over the years.

And just like the AMDGPU-Pro and Catalyst losing older GPUs, this really doesn't effect anyone other than people needing new features that they probably wouldn't get on the older GPU anyways. I expect AMDVLK-Legacy packages to appear that'll be the previous version for older GPU users to use as a stop-gap.

[user1]

Can somebody explain what's the point of that driver? It never really worked for me on Polaris. Installing it straight up breaks most of games or other apps I use. I never even successfully used that for once and I need to make sure it's uninstalled or I'll be wasting time trying to figure out what broke my graphics.

My first guess is that it breaks most things because of the switchable graphics layer they introduced a few months ago. Since then, my games also stopped working with AMDVLK (both open and pro).

[crt0mega]

And here ends my brief AMDVLK testing history xD

[bple2137]

I love how Linux has always several fundamentally different libraries for the exact same purpose, so that end users could be more confused. I don't mind having alternatives, but there should be some easy to understand mechanism to control what's being used (other than providing some long environment variables you need to duckduckgo every time).