Mesa RADV vs. AMDVLK Radeon Vulkan Performance For July 2021

[Venemo]

It sounds strange that "developing a driver for Stadia" worsens its performance for other games.

This is not about having it "worsen", but about lack of testing and performance tuning for some games. Driver developers can create more optimal code paths for some use cases in order to improve performance.

There are actually a lot of Vulkan games for which the AMDVLK code base contains specific optimizations. It just seems that the benchmarks in this article don't focus on those games.

[pal666]

Like it or not, Proton is now a central part of Linux gaming and it's Valve's central focus with the upcoming Steam Deck. And that's the problem with AMDVLK devs

i don't see how it's a problem with amdvlk devs. valve makes console and makes driver for it, everyone is happy

[pal666]

Aren't drivers developed according to standards? It sounds strange that "developing a driver for Stadia" worsens its performance for other games.

i don't think standards say anything about performance

[pal666]

AMDVLK simply exists for two reasons:

actually it exists for one reason: amd has to cater for all of their userbase, not just for 1% of linux users

[F.Ultra]

They actually use the open one, although I don't know if it's modified. Google didn't explicitly say Stadia uses AMDVLK, but it said that it utilizes Radeon GPU profiler and LLVM, so that's how eveyone figured out it's AMDVLK-open.

That and e.g the fact that games like Metro Exodus works flawless with AMDVLK but crashes hard on RADV (and it was on Stadia long before they sold the Linux version).

Aren't drivers developed according to standards? It sounds strange that "developing a driver for Stadia" worsens its performance for other games.

Things haven't worked that way since about 2000.

[agd5f]

Don't like AMDVLK, don't use it. No one is forcing you to. There are some customers that want it. Would you prefer if it were closed source? And before someone suggests it, getting rid of AMDVLK does not suddenly free up a pile of developers to work on something else. That team still has to support other OSes and APIs; Linux is just a small part of what they work on. PAL for example is used by more than just Vulkan.

[user1]

i don't see how it's a problem with amdvlk devs. valve makes console and makes driver for it, everyone is happy

I didn't talk specifically about Steam Deck, but their attitude towards bug reports. As I said, they're barely getting fixed. And it's not just about performance, but also in-game glitches, general instability / bugs that crash the kernel. As you can see in these tests, not every game was even able to start with AMDVLK.

[user1]

actually it exists for one reason: amd has to cater for all of their userbase, not just for 1% of linux users

But aren't we talking about AMDVLK-open which is exclusively for Linux? I think that's what he meant.

[tildearrow]

Honestly, i don't see the need RADV is already on pair even with the windows vulkan driver or sometimes faster at least from my PoV

It's just unfair the proprietary driver gets its own compiler while the open-source component only gets the slow LLVM...

[jrch2k8]

It's just unfair the proprietary driver gets its own compiler while the open-source component only gets the slow LLVM...

Well i still don't see any reason to waste dev time on it but i guess it could be a cool project for someone someday