AMD Has A Vulkan Linux Driver, But Will Be Closed-Source At First

[Deavir]

Thanks AMD. Looking to build new computers (wife's included) sometime next year and hope to use Zen and Fury. It is great to see them serious about the opensource transition. I am guessing they will be off closed OpenGL sometime next year when MESA catches up, and the Vulcan driver was probably morphed from Mantle and will need to rewritten clean.

[boffo]

easy to understand, big names like nvidia, amd, intel, apple, m$ steal code and use others code and they simply can open the source code without having legal problems

There are things that are good to open source and there are things that are better to be closed source in the user space to protect the customers from licensed technologies.

[dungeon]

AMD devs, any hope for Vulkan support on Catalyst or open source driver for Radeon HD 5800 series?

Answer is No for VLIWs.

You know actually until Vulkan spec is final and released (and it currently isn't) it is still questionable for entire GCN too , maybe even one or first two GCN gen does not get Vulkan support... so we will see

[kaprikawn]

Is there a video of this presentation, if so could someone link it?

[nightmarex]

"In the future they intend to focus more on open-source than closed-source."

Its like 12 years I hear AMD saying bullshit, they never get the damn thing finished. They are uncapable of putting on the market a finished product from A to Z. They keep promising Open Source drivers, but the truth is that by the time they get a 95% finished driver for your card the card is already old. So then you go and by a new card but the driver is unfinished, so they'll tell you the driver is under work.

It's like a circle, they never get you the product 100% working in no way, however you put it.

I find this amusing but for a different reason. Nvidia (on Windows no less!) does something called planned obsolescence (amd cards hold up better of time). A good example is the recent kepler + witcher3 shttp://www.pcinvasion.com/60-of-pc-invasion-readers-think-nvidia-crippled-kepler-for-witcher-3. Of course Nvidia crapworks is just garbage anyhow that destroys fps for pretty much any card... sigh. AMD cards hold up better and longer however I'm with you that I wish their opensauce drivers matured faster than just now getting SI up to speed and we're into fiji for FAHKSAKE! Anyhow I will worry about Vulkan support when there is a vulkan game (besides dota 2 that damn time sink was ruining me).

[Prescience500]

So...does this mean that the new OpenCL and Vulcan won't be using Gallium and the mesa stack like the current one does? That's what the slide seems to imply...though it may not matter much since no one else seems interesting in using Gallium for OpenCL.

[asdfblah]

Answer is No for VLIWs.

You know actually until Vulkan spec is final and released (and it currently isn't) it is still questionable for entire GCN too , maybe even one or first two GCN gen does not get Vulkan support... so we will see

I wonder if there will be partial support at least. Doubtful, but... who knows

[dungeon]

Is there a video of this presentation, if so could someone link it?

Here it is pointed out where you can expect videos:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum...678#post823678

I wonder if there will be partial support at least. Doubtful, but... who knows

You know Vulkan strongly depends on compute shaders, maybe even will on async shaders that AMD GCN hardware have... nVdia still does not have hardware for that So as always if you want to play Vulkan to play well you will want newest hardware.

Vulkan API should be also future proof, i don't think any vendor involved looking much backwards.

[haagch]

Their initial Vulkan driver is using DRI3.

And I guess that the PRIME synchronization issues will still not be solved then, making it basically unusable on intel+amd systems. Supposedly there should be no problems when the radeon gpu renders "fast enough", but even tesseract (just an example) at 100+fps produces very annoying graphical hickups with DRI3.

Their Vulkan driver is in user-space communicating with libdrm that in turn is interfacing with the AMDGPU kernel driver. The slides don't mention whether they intend to support Vulkan with the current Radeon DRM driver for HD 7000 through Rx 300 (non-Tonga/Carrizo/Fiji) GPUs

Of course not. *sigh*.

They already have some basic OpenCL open-source support via the Clover Gallium3D driver, but I imagine they're referring to OpenCL 2.1+ support with SPIR-V alongside Vulkan or the OpenCL Catalyst code.

What's the deal with OpenCL? With Beignet intel has had a (basically) complete OpenCL 1.2 implementation for quite some time now and clover still can't run http://www.mandelbulber.com/ for lack of clImage. This is taking forever while their other implementation is at the bleeding edge of technology?

In the future they intend to focus more on open-source than closed-source.

Why in the future? Why not now? They announced their open source driver 2007. Isn't it time to move their workstation clients to the open source driver and implement problematic (licensing/patents) technology in closed source libraries that can be loaded at runtime (like libtxc_dxtn)?

[boffo]

I really like that they will open source OpenCL and Vulkan. Having an out of the box support is important not just for the users but also for the devs that wants them.