Radeon Vulkan Driver Added To Mesa, Fresh Radeon Vulkan vs. OpenGL Benchmarks + AMDGPU-PRO

[artivision]

AMD will release their own because they want shared development effort and cross OS Api behaviour. RADV is a very good pressure for that to happen fast. That doesn't mean that other Gpus don't need Vulkan, like HD5-6 series and Nvidia with Nouveau.

[dungeon]

Vulkan can't be shared across vendors ... also HD5/6 serie might only get Tulkan but not Vulkan

[s_j_newbury]

I'm not convinced even an open sourced AMD implementation would obsolete RADV. Outside of AMD, there is much more advantage to code sharing across vendors than code sharing across OS. I suspect it's more likely an open sourced "Vulkan PRO" would be used a development resource for RADV (licence permitting) than a replacement.

[s_j_newbury]

Wrong.
PRO is Ubuntu only and IIRC OpenCL was "reduced" to v1.2 because these PRO drivers are just betas...
Unfortunately, the last Catalyst that could be adopted by many distributions hasn't seen an update for nearly a year.

TBH, I don't want a Catalyst. I'd rather see some OpenCL for the open source driver.

There is *some* OpenCL for the open source driver. https://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/GalliumCompute/

[s_j_newbury]

Vulkan can't be shared across vendors ... also HD5/6 serie might only get Tulkan but not Vulkan

Are you sure HD5/6 is unsupportable? Obviously somebody would have to do the work, probably starting with the amdgpu kernel driver. No doubt it isn't something AMD would want to be spending time on, since they want to sell new cards! ;-)

[dungeon]

It is not about selling new chips always, as even Mantle was GCN only API is designed for new hardware, so what you expect there i dunno... Tulkan maybe, but Vulkan no

[Xaero_Vincent]

So two different drivers with varying performance levels, depending on the game. What we need is a fast driver switcher. Somehow have both AMDGPU-Pro and Mesa drivers installed at the same time and make a game launching script that restarts X with that driver enabled and then opens the game. This way each game can have the fastest driver for it.

[Veto]

Let me help you with that: ((-10)+(-40))/2= -25....

Thank you for attempting to be helpful. However it was a 10% increase, hence a positive number...

[mibo]

There is *some* OpenCL for the open source driver. https://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/GalliumCompute/

Thanks for the link.
The image support still seems to be missing (I want to use it for darktable and NeatImage).
libclc needs llvm 3.9 which I couldn't find easily for my OpenSuse 42.1 so, I couldn't try it out.

[mibo]

Wrong, PRO is only supported on Ubuntu. As per almost everything else on linux you can probably find a way to get it onto your distro of choice, although some will support that most easilly than others (like Arch with their AUR for example)

As far as I could see, it works only for specific kernels. The next small kernel update can break it. AMD officially only offers a driver for ubuntu x86_64.
So, for me this is no replacement for the old binary drivers that just worked for me (OpenSuse) thanks to a niche un/installer from http://sebastian-siebert.de/