Happy Holidays: AMD Finally Pushing Out Open-Source Vulkan Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Happy Holidays: AMD Finally Pushing Out Open-Source Vulkan Driver

Ahead of the Vulkan 1.0 debut nearly two years ago, we heard that for AMD's Vulkan Linux driver it was initially going to be closed-source and would then be open-sourced once ready. At the time it sounded like something that would be opened up six months or so, but finally that milestone is being reached! Ahead of Christmas, AMD is publishing the source code to their official Vulkan Linux driver.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=25631

[salsadoom]

Wow, neat-o!

This actually took so long, until I read this this morning I forgot they were doing that, lol. Well, that's a very good thing as the AMD Vulkan performance on Linux is actually pretty bad right now. Merry xmas, indeed!

[Michael]

The repo where it should end up appearing is, at least according to the slide: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers

[smartalgorithm]

AMD keeps us happy... thanks!

[jrch2k8]

Thinking back to the past, I'll wait for RADV to mature a bit more. I have the impression the AMD Vk driver is going to be a pain to install and judging from OpenGL I think RADV will end up being faster and is way more likely that will play nicer with OpenGL as well.

The good thing is that probably RADV can cherry pick optimizations and some of those out-of-tree patches for LLVM will benefit it as well

[Michael]

Thinking back to the past, I'll wait for RADV to mature a bit more. I have the impression the AMD Vk driver is going to be a pain to install and judging from OpenGL I think RADV will end up being faster and is way more likely that will play nicer with OpenGL as well.

The good thing is that probably RADV can cherry pick optimizations and some of those out-of-tree patches for LLVM will benefit it as well

The 17.40 Vulkan vs. RADV benchmarks will be up shortly

[geearf]

I wonder what the future of AMD Vulkan driver will be.
Based on the benchmarks here, the old proprietary driver seemed to always be faster than RADV, and I would assume it to be more feature complete for all cards it supports, but many devs are already used to work on RADV and it's shipped in distributions already, it's also using the common infrastructure which should be a plus too.

I guess in the short time, I'm looking forward to comments on this new code by the RADV devs.

[Leopard]

I don't understand it.

So they open sourced driver but it will still come with GPU-Pro.

Mesa users won't benefit of that. What is the point really?

[jrch2k8]

The 17.40 Vulkan vs. RADV benchmarks will be up shortly

sweet

[Michael]

I don't understand it.

So they open sourced driver but it will still come with GPU-Pro.

Mesa users won't benefit of that. What is the point really?

It will come with AMDGPU-PRO if using the --pro argument. Or you can build the driver manually from its soon-to-be-out Git repository. But it's not going to be in mesa since it's not based on Mesa/Gallium3D infrastructure in any way. You should presumably be able to build this fine alongside other Mesa drivers installed on the system.