AMDVLK vs. Mesa RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver Performance On Linux

[Quackdoc]

stupid question, I cannot understand the advantage in investing in two different drivers. Why not merging amdvlk and radv and focusing on a single, well optimized, driver?

amdvlk needs to exist anyways for windows, and besides that radv still has various issues (afaik it still doesn't support DRM HDR setting, maybe mistaken though). that may not be super simple to solve

[cipper]

amdvlk needs to exist anyways for windows, and besides that radv still has various issues (afaik it still doesn't support DRM HDR setting, maybe mistaken though). that may not be super simple to solve

I guess Windows version has its dedicated devs, that's not relevant. Of course there are differences between the two drivers, but it would be advantageous for amd to collaborate with mesa devs and work to merge amdvlk and radv in a single mesa driver. Especially given the good performance of radv. The question is: what prevents amd to do that?

[Kjell]

amdvlk can't run Halo Infinite
Glad MESA is well developed
https://mesamatrix.net/

[cipper]

amdvlk can't run Halo Infinite

you keep reporting the differences between the two drivers, this is not what I'm asking. Is it so hard to understand my question? If you don't have an answer just don't reply.

[Kjell]

you keep reporting the differences between the two drivers, this is not what I'm asking. Is it so hard to understand my question? If you don't have an answer just don't reply.

I didn't reply to your or any question in the first place

[cipper]

I didn't reply to your or any question in the first place

you're right, apologies.

[ms178]

you keep reporting the differences between the two drivers, this is not what I'm asking. Is it so hard to understand my question? If you don't have an answer just don't reply.

I've had the same question initially, but I doubt we will get an open answer here as that idea fell apart quickly due to control, internal company politics and timing. AMD initially promised an "open" Vulkan Linux driver that did not materialize in time, some open source devs were fed up with this and didn't trust AMD anyways to set it up as a real collaborative project (and amdvlk is basically just a code drop every now and then without too much influence nor insight from the community).

Nowadays RADV and radeonsi share some code, so that is already an improvement in using developer ressources more efficiently. I don't know what the long term driver strategy is though and if RADV will become their main effort for Windows and Linux somewhen in the future. There were some efforts to build RADV on Windows at least.

[airminer]

I guess Windows version has its dedicated devs, that's not relevant. Of course there are differences between the two drivers, but it would be advantageous for amd to collaborate with mesa devs and work to merge amdvlk and radv in a single mesa driver. Especially given the good performance of radv. The question is: what prevents amd to do that?

AFAIK the windows version doesn't have its dedicated devs - or rather its the other way around: The linux version of AMDVLK doesn't have many dedicated devs.

AMDVLK is essentially the windows vulkan driver - AMD's proprietary shader compiler + the open source LLVM shader compiler backend.

The windows driver and AMDVLK both use a common hardware abstraction layer to talk to the kernel, which is not used at all in mesa.

So maintaining AMDVLK as-is is cheap and low burden for AMD, while supporting RADV directly would mean either supporting two totally separate driver stacks, where any improvements they make won't translate over "automatically" to the other platforms they support - or rearchitecting their whole driver stack on non-linux platforms to use mesa at great cost.

[Quackdoc]

I guess Windows version has its dedicated devs, that's not relevant. Of course there are differences between the two drivers, but it would be advantageous for amd to collaborate with mesa devs and work to merge amdvlk and radv in a single mesa driver. Especially given the good performance of radv. The question is: what prevents amd to do that?

it's been mentioned here before, but amdvlk is largely the same driver on windows that it is on linux, also AMD does have devs working on radv. you also can't just merge the two drivers, amdvlk and radv are very different beasts. it wouldnt be productive to do that. in fact it would probably be largely detrimental

So maintaining AMDVLK as-is is cheap and low burden for AMD, while supporting RADV directly would mean either supporting two totally separate driver stacks, where any improvements they make won't translate over "automatically" to the other platforms they support - or rearchitecting their whole driver stack on non-linux platforms to use mesa at great cost.

as mentioned above, amd does support mesa

[Sacredsin]

I tested this a while back https://youtu.be/MRKEpmqvYR8
Apart from Cyberpunk, which seems to perform decent on AMDVLK, other games perform terribly, RADV is still king