AMDVLK Dropped Vega While Mesa's RADV Is Continuing To Make Vega Faster In 2023

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMDVLK Dropped Vega While Mesa's RADV Is Continuing To Make Vega Faster In 2023

Last week with the AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 driver, AMD removed support for Polaris and Vega GPUs from this official open-source Vulkan driver. But as mentioned this doesn't impact the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver maintained by Valve, Red Hat, and other open-source developers. In fact, this week another optimization for Vega/GFX9 was merged for Mesa 24.0-devel...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-24.0-Faster-RADV-Vega

[fitzie]

Wow. xorg keeps getting better and better. thanks for all the developers making X11 better every day!

[Akiko]

Wow. xorg keeps getting better and better. thanks for all the developers making X11 better every day!

Wait what?!? MESA has nothing to do with Xorg/X11. Using kmsdrm, drm or libegl directly you can do accelerated 3d stuff without ever touching a display server (aka Xorg/X11, Wayland or whatever ... uhm, yeah, and Mir).

[chromer]

Why AMD is doing that? Vega isn't too old and aging, it's still a good gpu.

[user1]

If it turns out that AMD will soon drop support for Polaris and Vega on Windows as well, then I think it will really suck for OpenGL users on WIndows. About a year ago AMD first introduced its new OpenGL Windows driver (OGLP). While it does bring significant performance improvements in many games, it's still very rough. For example, some games I tested with it actually had lower performance than the previous driver and one game had completely broken rendering with it. I've also seen a lot of other complains that emulators are broken with this new driver. I tested it a while ago, so maybe all these issues are now fixed, but if they don't, it will be a bummer for those users.

[dlq84]

Why AMD is doing that? Vega isn't too old and aging, it's still a good gpu.

Because AMDVLK is mostly for professional use, professionals upgrade more often.

Just use RADV, it's faster anyway.

[stargeizer]

Why AMD is doing that? Vega isn't too old and aging, it's still a good gpu.

AMD doesn't have the resouces Nvidia (Software centric company doing hardware) has to maintain their GPU's for a long time. Slow sales during the pandemic, and programmed obsolecense are the main reasons. Polaris is from 2016, Vega is from 2017. Five years is too much for a hardware centric company doing software.

[timofonic]

Does amdvlk has any advantage over MESA?

[fitzie]

Wait what?!? MESA has nothing to do with Xorg/X11. Using kmsdrm, drm or libegl directly you can do accelerated 3d stuff without ever touching a display server (aka Xorg/X11, Wayland or whatever ... uhm, yeah, and Mir).

I use mesa under xorg so it improves my experience. just because xorg code doesn't change, doesn't mean my xorg based experience didn't improve due to these mesa improvements. As a Xorg user I'm grateful when there are improvements made that impact me. So hence my gratitude.

sorry if this confuses you.

[johanb]

I use mesa under xorg so it improves my experience. just because xorg code doesn't change, doesn't mean my xorg based experience didn't improve due to these mesa improvements. As a Xorg user I'm grateful when there are improvements made that impact me. So hence my gratitude.

sorry if this confuses you.

That's like saying "My car got faster, because they raised the speed limit on the highway". It got faster for everyone else driving a car too.

Your statement is not wrong, it's just very misleading and needs some mental gymnastics to come up with.