How Open-Source Allowed Valve To Implement VULKAN Much Faster On The Source 2 Engine

[Dukenukemx]

No, pre-GCN cards don't support DirectX12/Vulkan. Atleast RadeonHD 7000+ is required, and I read in some of their Vulkan related slides that it's in a buggy state on GCN 1.0 hardware (RadeonHD 7000 series and some rebranded Rx 200 cards)

I really doubt Vulkan wouldn't work on pre-GCN hardware. Since it's open source we will find out if Vulkan can or can't work on older cards.

[finalzone]

Meanwhile, AMD, the creator of this Mantle/Vulkan stuff, hasn't released a single line of code for their Linux OSS driver.
AMD keeps missing business opportunities. No wonder it's going down...

Really? Care to explain this page AMD Open Source Zone, AMD offers open-source Linux driver for hardware video decoding?
Some codes cannot be released due to legal issues but the announcement of AMDKFD initiative show how the above claim share no solid foundation. Need to remind some active AMD contributors read Phoronix post.

[zanny]

Really? Care to explain this page AMD Open Source Zone, AMD offers open-source Linux driver for hardware video decoding?
Some code cannot be released due to legal but the announcement of AMDKFD initiative show how the above claim share no solid foundation.

Just as a line of defense even if I do not agree with whom you replied to, if AMD created Mantle in house, there would be no legal reason they could not release the subtree of their driver codebase that implements it. We already have the ISA books for GCN, so I cannot imagine them having trade secret shared patent hardware on the cards that is in their Mantle driver that they are just ignoring the existence of in RadeonSI.

One more question -to anyone that can answer-. Which cards are going to support Vulkan. Only the newer ones or it will go further back.

Any card that could run OGL 4.2 will be capable of running Mantle, but on Linux only the radeonSI driver uses LLVM for its shader compiler and thus for r600 to see support would require either rewriting it to compile in LLVM or writing a SPIR-V compiler for it. Which is pretty unlikely. That means we are most likely to see pretty quick adoption of Vulcan on Gallium and radeonSI, since it only needs to use Khronos' SPIR -> LLVM compiler since the shader compiler is already in LLVM. But r600 will probably only happen if someone in the community takes on the task, because its older hardware and I cannot imagine AMD throwing engineers on what would be a pretty big task.

[dungeon]

Thanks for the answers.

One more question -to anyone that can answer-. Which cards are going to support Vulkan. Only the newer ones or it will go further back.

On Windows 10 people says DX 12 support is buggy or non existent yet for GCN 1.0 or nVidia Fermi. So it is safe to guess, that it seems to driver devs have hard time to implement it for those... same as Vulkan as future proof tech, best bet seems to starting with Kepler and GCN 1.1

Now on Linux side (and guessin' you asking about AMD hardware for example) and opensource drivers in particular i expect amdgpu supported hardware to support it well... as always, only newer hardware make sense .

So it just depends on what hardware will be supported well, for that to know you need to have Vulkan specs released (which are not released yet) and you need to know how partucular gen works and its limitations (that might be hard to really know without working for AMD, even then devs can only found some issues down to the road, etc)... Third factor is timing and dev resources. So if Vulkan does not 100% align to particular gen, those will be community supported .

[blackout23]

"Any card that could run OGL 4.2 will be capable of running Mantle,"

That's BS.

https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/library/overview/2015_vulkan_v1_Overview.pdf

OpenGL ES 3.1 is a minimum requirement.

OpenGL 4.2 isn't even compatible with OpenGL ES 3.0.

That would be OpenGL 4.3, which is basically available only on DirectX11 hardware that also supports compute.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#OpenGL_4.3

[asdfblah]

Really? Care to explain this page AMD Open Source Zone, AMD offers open-source Linux driver for hardware video decoding?
Some codes cannot be released due to legal issues but the announcement of AMDKFD initiative show how the above claim share no solid foundation. Need to remind some active AMD contributors read Phoronix post.

In this context, "hasn't released a single line of code for their Linux OSS driver" refers to Mantle/Vulkan.
The radeon driver devs have done a great job with their driver, but looks to me as if AMD itself didn't care much. If they really cared, they could have developed Mantle in Linux, and they have not done so.
I imagine Valve could be selling AMD hardware with Mantle/Vulkan-enabled games already. Instead, Valve chose to invest in the Intel driver. *That* is a missed business opportunity.
BTW, all the radeon devs read (and sometimes reply to posts in) phoronix... but they are not AMD, they are individual employees. AMD is a big organization just like every other company, and I doubt their Linux devs have too much influence.
I hope I'm wrong, though. I wish we could be seeing Vulkan being implemented by these devs in the next months...

[bridgman]

The radeon driver devs have done a great job with their driver, but looks to me as if AMD itself didn't care much.

Do you mean "didn't care other than hiring the developers, spending the $$ to pay them, spending the $$ to work through the IP release issues, and taking all the business/legal risks ??". How much more care are you looking for ?

If they really cared, they could have developed Mantle in Linux, and they have not done so. I imagine Valve could be selling AMD hardware with Mantle/Vulkan-enabled games already. Instead, Valve chose to invest in the Intel driver. *That* is a missed business opportunity.

News flash. If we had developed Mantle for Linux instead of Windows we wouldn't have the tier-1 game houses signed up and I doubt we would have Vulkan today.

BTW, all the radeon devs read (and sometimes reply to posts in) phoronix... but they are not AMD, they are individual employees.

Um... AMD is a company, it has no fingers and can't type.

Maybe in the future companies will become giant AI's and be able to respond directly, but until then you're stuck with us employees

[rabcor]

Thanks for the answers.

One more question -to anyone that can answer-. Which cards are going to support Vulkan. Only the newer ones or it will go further back.

The way I understood things, Nvidia Geforce 8000 series and up (I think either 8600 or 8800), and AMD Radeon HD 6000 series and up. (I think AMD said somewhere they are not interested in supporting vulkan on their 5000 series)


But besides the AMD hardware, we're talking basically all gaming cards that people are still using to actually play games (although I feel a bit sorry for those guys that still have an 8600 card, honestly a good friend of mine upgraded from 8600 only a good 3 years ago (straight to 600), and he still has that 1680x1050 monitor he's had for 8 years now (as of this month)) and he's from a lower middle-class family where I live.

[Nille_kungen]

I wish we could be seeing Vulkan being implemented by these devs in the next months...

Vulcan isn't officially released yet, so why should they release the code for it now?
The intel driver isn't released yet either, all we now is that Valve payed LunarG to develop a driver and it's said that the driver was used in an demo.
There isn't any open source vulcan code yet on linux, so what are you actually nagging about?

[nightmarex]

Do you mean "didn't care other than hiring the developers, spending the $$ to pay them, spending the $$ to work through the IP release issues, and taking all the business/legal risks ??". How much more care are you looking for ?

It seems the resource constraint at AMD may have a toll on Linux development but the last thing any of us want to see is more driver neglect on Linux. I would gladly donate to AMD for driver Linux development (either driver FFS).
I buy everything but AMD ram, several APU's, processors and video cards in the last 2 years alone for me and my family. But it seems this doesn't entitle me to want AMD to work hard on LINUX (seriously I could give a fuck about Windows period) even though that's 100% of the purpose of my purchases. Mantle should of came to Linux, it was *"bulllshit lazy" it didn't. With Vulkan on the way it's pointless now but if it was cross platform it may of had more of a impact, as you say, with tier-1 companies such as the momentum behind Vulkan which has many big names.

I don't want you to think that I am being overly critical but I purchase AMD hardware but if they need more money for software fine, something like a kickstarted campaign to fund AMD driver development, hell, even people who use NVIDIA because of current or past drivers would probably donate because of the remembered need =).

* with valve stating how easy it was to make a vulkan driver I believe mantle drivers to be just as trivial so yeah, what the fuck.