AMD's Vulkan Driver Will Only Work With The AMDGPU Kernel Driver

[haagch]

You could do theoretically do vulkan on pre-GCN parts, but it you wouldn't gain much over existing APIs.

just don't expect much of a gain compared to older APIs.

Have you played some linux games on radeonsi lately?

On my HD 7970M:
Here is Caffeine (Unreal 4): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8-RRzBarK4
Here is Saints Row 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgjquxK8mqM

We are not looking for a gain compared to nvidia's opengl driver, we are looking for a gain compared to the abysmal framerates you get today in many games. Native Counter Strike GO still drops under 60 fps all the time while with gallium nine it stays comfortably above 60 fps all the time on my HD 7970M. There are real deficiencies currently that I expect would be barely there with Vulkan.

Yes, vulkan support is working already. What we have yet to finalize is the exact manner and timelines in which we roll out support for various asic families.

At least some good news, thanks.

Nope, this is a clear message that everyone needs to read the articles more carefully.
If the answer from AMD had been "we will only ever support Vulkan on the set of GPUs which are enabled by default on upstream amdgpu today" that would be different, but that's not what we said.

Wait, AMD does think about supporting older GCN GPUs with amdgpu? The last time the question came up the reply was more like "why would you want that?"...

[drSeehas]

... I'm less likely to pick an API if a significant percentage of my potential customers don't have drivers that support it. ... not supporting Vulkan on that hardware is still a bad decision for AMD because it will hinder Vulkan adoption, and AMD needs Vulkan to catch on.

???
Vulkan won't be available on Windows for pre-VI hardware?
Where did you get this from?

Linux is really not a significant percentage of potential customers!

[Michael]

So, Vulkan and D3D12 work only on GCN Cards. Thats fine but now the Problem. The AMDGPU driver support only a very small amount from the GCN Cards. So, can we expect that the driver support in the near future all GCN Cards?

You Can Help Bring Vulkan Support To Older AMD GCN GPUs http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Help-Bring-Older-GCN-To-AMDGPU

[Berniyh]

What's the big deal here? Why are so many people going mad?

The statement is, that Vulcan support will only be provided on the amdgpu driver and on GCN. That potentially means everything from HD8xxx upwards, if I'm not mistaken.
Everything else is more than 3 years old, so what's the big deal?

Vulkan was never announced for HD5k and HD6k Cards. There is even no D3D12 Support or Mantle Support for this cards.

So, Vulkan and D3D12 work only on GCN Cards. Thats fine but now the Problem. The AMDGPU driver support only a very small amount from the GCN Cards. So, can we expect that the driver support in the near future all GCN Cards?

Experimental support for CI chips is already implemented in amdgpu, SI chips have afaik not been explicitely excluded.
Since for CI and SI, a driver already exists that is fully functional (radeonsi), it is only to be expected, that they first focus on the chips (VI) which do not yet have a driver when implementing amdgpu.

So the chances are there, that basically everything from the last three years *might* receive support in amdgpu and therefore potentially Vulcan support. And for CI chips, it actually seems very likely given that there is already experimental support.

I really don't get what all the fuzz is about.

[Berniyh]

The last time the question came up the reply was more like "why would you want that?"...

Well that is a question which up to now was a very good one. But yeah, here might be your answer.

[Nille]

You Can Help Bring Vulkan Support To Older AMD GCN GPUs http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Help-Bring-Older-GCN-To-AMDGPU

The Community is a lie. If amd not stepped up for foss driver development, we would have today the status from 6-7 years ago.

[mannerov]

The Community is a lie. If amd not stepped up for foss driver development, we would have today the status from 6-7 years ago.

The advantage of going open source is not to have little fairies do all the work.
In fact if you read some analysis of people working in the field, you'll find that companies are pretty well aware of that.

Most of the contributions has to come from the company. Then the little fairies will do some minor but interesting contributions, enhance compatibility, do fixes, find regressions, etc.
That's exactly what happens with Mesa to me. People do report regressions, do implement some extensions, do some fixes, and some other things (gallium nine, etc).

[chithanh]

The Community is a lie. If amd not stepped up for foss driver development, we would have today the status from 6-7 years ago.

A couple of major Mesa radeonsi features were backported to r600g by the community. For example, airlied did the tesselation work.

I don't see why it must be "a lie" when it comes to the kernel.

[Nille]

For example, airlied did the tesselation work.

The Red Hat employee that get payed to work on the FOSS-Drivers.

[chithanh]

Yeah, well, community ≠ unpaid volunteers.