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

[theriddick]

You would need two Tonga cards in crossfire. Unfortunately crossfire support for Linux is non-existent. However Vulkan should do crossfire natively, 'SHOULD'....

[Marc Driftmeyer]

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.

Hey dick shit, when I worked at NeXT and Apple what I post about it is actual past experience. Suck it up buttercup. If you don't like it too fucking bad.

[bridgman]

This is a clear message to game devs 'you need to support gl if you want Linux customers'... Thus slowing down Vulkan adoption significantly...

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.

[alexThunder]

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.

Nope again. This is a clear message, that computers are confusing.

[blackout23]

You would need two Tonga cards in crossfire. Unfortunately crossfire support for Linux is non-existent. However Vulkan should do crossfire natively, 'SHOULD'....

If the developer (or engine middleware) puts time into developing multi GPU support in their Vulkan renderer.

[theriddick]

People are reading more into what HAS NOT been said about AMDGPU and Vulkan drivers, which is what concerns everyone the most. How long I wonder till Vulkan is out I wonder? hope its end of this month or next...

[Nille_kungen]

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.

Instead of calling Marc an liar try looking him up on the net.
Personally i like when people that actually been around tells their stories.

[jrch2k8]

Well to be honest AMD said Vulkan will come first as closed source driver and will be eventually open source, hence is painfully obvious that only AMDGPU will get it since is the one kernel driver infrastructure for both open source and closed driver from now on. This doesn't mean AMD will not support RadeonSI class hardware in the future(i heavily suspect part of the kernel code is actually missing and their focus is on AMDGPU for now[to receive the blob part of the driver] )

[MaxToTheMax]

You could do theoretically do vulkan on pre-GCN parts, but it you wouldn't gain much over existing APIs. Pre-GCN hardware does not have independent compute pipes, so compute and graphics could not be submitted asynchronously and executed in parallel. Shader resources are fixed so you can only have a limited number of resources in flight at any given time and you'd have to explicitly bind the resources at execution time. If someone wants to work on vulkan support for older parts, I certainly won't stop you, just don't expect much of a gain compared to older APIs.

Suppose I'm a game developer, and I only have the time/budget/inclination to target one graphics API. I'm less likely to pick an API if a significant percentage of my potential customers don't have drivers that support it. Plenty of people still have HD5000-6000 cards, so not supporting Vulkan on those cards will have the effect of hindering Vulkan adoption. If I have to write an OpenGL backend, I may not bother with a Vulkan backend. Frankly, this is bad news for AMD, since AMD's OpenGL/DirectX<12 performance is not competitive.

The fact that you might not get performance gains out of pre-GCN hardware is not relevant; 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.

[theriddick]

Plenty of people still have HD5000-6000 cards, so not supporting Vulkan on those cards will have the effect of hindering Vulkan adoption.

Most developers don't even support those cards in their minimal requirement anymore. 7000 series certainly however. I just hope I don't need to wait 10years after vulkan release to get good drivers for my 390x....