You Can Help Bring Vulkan Support To Older AMD GCN GPUs

[Nille_kungen]

What i want to know is if the closed source vulcan driver will be opened up.
We heard that initially there will be an closed vulcan driver and later on an open sourced one but that doesn't mean that it will be the same driver.
If it's not the same driver then how far along is the open source vulcan implementation?
I get the feeling that many think that the closed vulcan driver will be opened up but do we have any confirmation that it's like that?
As long as there will be en fully functional driver in an reasonable amount of time i will be pleased.

[blackout23]

And where are the open drivers for this? ohh right, you don't have nvidia support for that!

AMDPGPU is clearly the way to go, it is open, included in the kernel and you can use both open drivers or close driver on top of it.

All this doubt is because the AMDGPU is still not finished, so they are investing the resource in new cards. Older cards have right now better support in radeonsi. When AMDGPU is at same state as radeonSI, AMD or the community can enable the support for older cards and fix any remaining bugs.

Doing the same thing as nvidia would be release the catalyst driver with vulkan for all GCN cards... but no one want to keep catalyst around any more., it is a dead end.

LOL I prefer working drivers over broken pseudo open source drivers that need closed source microcode blobs any day.

I guess you also only playing strictly open source games right?

[BenPope]

What i want to know is if the closed source vulcan driver will be opened up.
We heard that initially there will be an closed vulcan driver and later on an open sourced one but that doesn't mean that it will be the same driver.
If it's not the same driver then how far along is the open source vulcan implementation?
I get the feeling that many think that the closed vulcan driver will be opened up but do we have any confirmation that it's like that?
As long as there will be en fully functional driver in an reasonable amount of time i will be pleased.

It's probably a case of getting it working asap and then replacing or getting approval from legal about the bits that may not be suitably licensed.

Or a conspiracy. Obviously.

[bug77]

There is a very large dose of reading comprehension difficulties in many of the responses to this and other similar threads.

AMD refusing to confirm undecided plans has turned into AMD refusing to support older cards and AMD specifically requesting contributions from others.

What is so hard about comprehending what has been and what has not been said by representatives of AMD? Filling the gaps with speculation and asinine hyperbole is not helpful or useful.

Depends on how much slack you're willing to cut AMD.
They have not said they plan on adding GCN 1.0 or 1.1 on day 1 or even after that. The only thing they confirmed is GCN 1.2. That means 390 or 390X are left in the cold.

And now there are those who think AMD will add support at some point (the only statement we have from AMD, points us to "the community" and its mercy) and those think AMD doesn't have the resources to do it (Polaris is incoming, keep that in mind) and will just sweet talk their way out of an embarrassing situation.

[Tomin]

All this doubt is because the AMDGPU is still not finished, so they are investing the resource in new cards. Older cards have right now better support in radeonsi. When AMDGPU is at same state as radeonSI, AMD or the community can enable the support for older cards and fix any remaining bugs.

You are comparing wrong things. radeonsi is a user space driver for 3D and AMDGPU is a kernel driver. Some cards use radeonsi with radeon kernel driver.

I wonder why Terascale (HD6000 series or older) can't support Vulkan but Fermi can. At least for what I have heard Nvidia is going to support Vulkan on all OpenGL 4 capable cards which means Fermi (GTX400/500), Kepler (GTX600/700), Maxwell and newer.

[Nille_kungen]

I wonder why Terascale (HD6000 series or older) can't support Vulkan but Fermi can. At least for what I have heard Nvidia is going to support Vulkan on all OpenGL 4 capable cards which means Fermi (GTX400/500), Kepler (GTX600/700), Maxwell and newer.

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum...730#post845730
I won't speculate how much of an improvement vulcan will be on present nvidia hardware considering their hw design but i think many expects more then it will deliver.

[MoonMoon]

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum...730#post845730
I won't speculate how much of an improvement vulcan will be on present nvidia hardware considering their hw design but i think many expects more then it will deliver.

You don't necessarily need to have improvements over OpenGL, in some cases being able to run Vulkan at all might be enough. For example, Stardock Entertainment has promised to look into a Linux port for Galactic Civilizations 3 (and other games) once Vulkan has been released. GalCiv 3 is not very demanding on the GPU, they list Radeon HD5000 and Geforce 500 series as minimal requirement, so people with an Nvidia card that fits into the recommendations, even if it runs not faster than OpenGL, will still be able to play it, while AMD owners need a recent card to play this game, though it wouldn't be needed from what the game actually demands.

[GreatEmerald]

Again, I don't see any reason to panic here. This is all quite logical: the new fglrx will only run on AMDGPU, and the Vulkan driver likewise. Then the latter will be open-sourced and ported to radeon. End of story, everyone is happy.

The reason why it can't run on radeon out of the box is pretty obvious to me: radeon doesn't have the userspace hooks that AMDGPU has, since the current userspace drivers don't need those extra hooks (yet).

[Melcar]

Well this sucks. Was hoping to use get to use Vulkan on my old GCN 1.0 card.

[eigenlambda]

There has to have been some significant change between GCN1.1 and GCN1.2 to justify forking Radeon from AMDGPU. Carrizo APUs with GCN1.2 can do preemptive multitasking and priority-based scheduling, which might be a reason for a different driver architecture.

Presumably Vulkan can also run on the Radeon driver, but wouldn't be easy to port. At any rate, GCN 1.1 has OpenGl 4.4 with padoka ppa ( https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-...ve/ubuntu/mesa ), but I can't really play all those ported Steam games like Bioshock Infinite or even Portal 2 on it.