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

[Michael]

I'm not sure how you talked to, but this is all still under heavy discussion internally. No final decisions have been made. The vulkan Linux driver was brought up on the amdgpu stack, perhaps that was what your source meant.

I'd have to ask the press lady who answered that question, she didn't say, but the call last week was with Chris Smith and some other names I hadn't dealt with before. All she had sent over was:

Will the forthcoming Vulkan driver be tied to the AMDGPU kernel driver / AMDGPU libdrm interfaces or will you also be officially supporting Vulkan outside of just the AMDGPU-specific scope?

Our Linux Vulkan drivers will only run on the amdgpu kernel driver. We have no plans, on Linux, to support Vulkan on any other driver stack.

[chuckula]

Sorry, but this makes sense. Game developers are freed up to target newer to newest hardware thus not handcapping them.

I believe that piece of garbage statement is true just about as much as I believe that nonsense you post about how you personally founded NeXT with Steve Jobs and other fantasy stories that you like to post all over the internet.

[BrandonB]

How long will it be before we expect games that require Vulkan to run?

[blackout23]

I'm not sure how you talked to, but this is all still under heavy discussion internally. No final decisions have been made. The vulkan Linux driver was brought up on the amdgpu stack, perhaps that was what your source meant.

All possible confusion aside, shouldn't this be set in stone by now?

[johnc]

I remember when Vulkan was announced and I said it would be DOA.

At this point I'm not sure it'll ever arrive.

[Veto]

Well, how difficult would it really be to make the AMDGPU driver support all GCN cards? The code is already available in the RadeonSI driver, and unless there is some fundamental differences, an enthusiastic C coder could probably do the job in reasonable time. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes, the kernel would probably have to keep the RadeonSI driver "forever" and enable the AMDGPU support by boot-line parameters. But in reality people would switch over quite quickly, when the major distros change.

[zanny]

Sorry, but this makes sense. Game developers are freed up to target newer to newest hardware thus not handcapping them.

This has nothing to do with game developers. Vulkan should be supported in full profile on anything shipping OpenGL 4.5, which includes all GCN hardware.

This also kills one of the cornerstone reasons for using Vulkan at all. The whole point was that Vulkan was this end all be all API that didn't have extension morass bullshit or fifteen different feature levels that would be supported everywhere so your performant Vulkan driver was portable to everything.

If AMD is only supporting half a dozen GPUs in their current release cycle, that means Vulkan is dead in the water until 2020 or later when you can expect all the current GPUs to be shelved for newer hardware.

Literally *everyone here* has been ranting and raving on and on about how since Vulkan can in theory work on everything since Windows XP and DirectX 9 hardware and up it would support every GPU ever and have scaling feature profiles as the GPU generations matured towards full DSA capable hardware like in the OGL 4.5 supporting cards. That is obviously not happening now, which also eliminates pretty much the only distraction we had while DirectX 12 has been out and about taking over game development houses for almost a year now since its been released for so long while Vulkan is still being delayed while hidden behind a curtain.

I imagine we are going to see the same story play out with Intel at release - its all sunshine and rainbows until we actually see this Vulkan Intel driver and learn it doesn't support any GPUs before Broadwell, and then congratulations, your new API is DOA because it doesn't support 70% of hardware in circulation.

[artivision]

I'm not sure how you talked to, but this is all still under heavy discussion internally. No final decisions have been made. The vulkan Linux driver was brought up on the amdgpu stack, perhaps that was what your source meant.

You inflate it a lot. We all now that Vulcan needs only SM5a and classic Compute Shaders. The rest can be done on software or you made it up. Fake reasons to exclude HD5000-6000 series. But don't thing that will go your way, a lot of people can program (my self included).

[eydee]

So surprising, not even released yet, already breaking the specification.

[mike4]

For not falling behind Nvidia they also need to support Vulkan inside existing OpenGL apps.
On the other side devs should prefer opensource to proprietary extensions by Nvidia.