Valve Still Making RADV Driver Improvements To AMD GCN 1.0 Era Hardware

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve Still Making RADV Driver Improvements To AMD GCN 1.0 Era Hardware

On a quest toward trying to get the game Halo Infinite running under Linux via Steam Play (Proton) with AMD GFX6 / GCN 1.0 era graphics processors, Valve's prolific open-source driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset has added VK_NV_device_generated_commands support for these original Radeon GCN GPUs...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GFX6-RADV-DGC

[schmidtbag]

That's really cool of Valve to support an outdated platform like that. I see no financial advantage in them doing so, but I'm certainly not going to complain.

[Danny3]

So nice of them!
Take that Nvidia with you close source crap model!

[qarium]

on these GCN1.0 cards isn't it so that the cards by default do not use AMDGPU kernel driver ? it uses the old RadeonSI kernel driver.

thats why people can not use vulkan on these cards... to fix vulkan well... whould they not make the AMDGPU kernel driver make the default for these cards ?

[NeoMorpheus]

Thank you Lord GabeN!

[Venemo]

on these GCN1.0 cards isn't it so that the cards by default do not use AMDGPU kernel driver ? it uses the old RadeonSI kernel driver

RadeonSI is not a kernel driver. It is a userspace driver for OpenGL.

[tuxd3v]

Valve is doing what AMD should do too.
If people brought the hardware, they should have support fot it.
For valve its important to reach the biggest amount of people, and for people its important to have support for their devices..so its a win-win situation here.

[qarium]

RadeonSI is not a kernel driver. It is a userspace driver for OpenGL.

point is GCN1 cards do not use the AMDGPU kernel driver and vulkan in RADV only works with AMDGPU..

it use the old radeon kernel driver because of this by default people have no vulkan with GCN1 cards.

this work on vulkan is only usefull if the amdgpu kernel driver is set to be the default for these cards.

[qarium]

Valve is doing what AMD should do too.
If people brought the hardware, they should have support fot it.

AMD can not do it and the reason is simple: at some point after you bought the hardware the money you did give amd is completely consumed... if amd is forced to give support a unlimited time then sell hardware is a losing business... and no one does a losing business...

wha Valve is able to do it is because they do not make money on hardware they make money on the valve steam shop
And these shops tent to be profitable unlimited time

For valve its important to reach the biggest amount of people, and for people its important to have support for their devices..so its a win-win situation here.

of course it is a win for the customers and a win for valve... and the opensource driver is also a win for amd and the customers.

just remember a concept like this is impossible with closed source drivers... thats why it is pointless to buy Nvidia hardware for linux gaming.

even if valve wants to they can nix fix a bug in the Nvidia drivers...

[Venemo]

this work on vulkan is only usefull if the amdgpu kernel driver is set to be the default for these cards.

Please tell that to the kernel maintainers. We (RADV developers) can't do much about it.