RADV Sees Experimental Fragment Shader Interlock - Important For Emulators, D3D12

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RADV Sees Experimental Fragment Shader Interlock - Important For Emulators, D3D12

A currently-testing implementation of VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock has been published for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver. This Vulkan fragment shader interlock support is used by some game emulators as well as being useful in running Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan and similar purposes...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-Frag-Shader-Interlock

[user1]

This is big news for emulator users because this is what has been requested to implement in AMDVLK, but AMD devs refused for unknown reasons. So much for "AMD's official supported driver".

This is yet again a reminder of what benefits a community made driver can provide over the official one.

I remember when radv was just announced in 2016, some criticized it for being a wasted effort because AMD was yet to announve their open source Vulkan driver. Well, they had absolutely no clue what would become of it.

[Quackdoc]

this is probably more GFX9+ stuff isnt it

[dragon321]

This is big news for emulator users because this is what has been requested to implement in AMDVLK, but AMD devs refused for unknown reasons. So much for "AMD's official supported driver".

This is yet again a reminder of what benefits a community made driver can provide over the official one.

I remember when radv was just announced in 2016, some criticized it for being a wasted effort because AMD was yet to announve their open source Vulkan driver. Well, they had absolutely no clue what would become of it.

Funny thing is that even MoltenVK supports that extension because Apple added equivalent for this in Metal 2.0. So if you run macOS on hardware with AMD GPU then you can use this extension by MoltenVK. Something you can't do if you are on Windows or Linux with official AMD drivers that supports Vulkan natively.

[mbriar]

this is probably more GFX9+ stuff isnt it

Yes, but that is most likely a hardware limitation since AMD doesn't support the equivalent D3D feature or D3D12 feature level 12_1 on older GPUs on windows either.

[Quackdoc]

Yes, but that is most likely a hardware limitation since AMD doesn't support the equivalent D3D feature or D3D12 feature level 12_1 on older GPUs on windows either.

it seems like there is a lot of this with polaris sadly

[Linuxxx]

That Russian "Triang3l" guy is such a genius!

Really hope the sanctions against the Russian regime won't cut him off from contributing to open-source projects one day...

PS:
He's also the lead rendering developer @ Saber Interactive in Saint Petersburg, who are currently working on the impressive looking Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2.

[schmidtbag]

I remember when radv was just announced in 2016, some criticized it for being a wasted effort because AMD was yet to announve their open source Vulkan driver. Well, they had absolutely no clue what would become of it.

Despite being a happy RADV user myself, I was one of such people; my argument was that having something is better than nothing, and AMD was getting two open-source Vulkan drivers while Nvidia, Snapdragon, Mali, Broadcom, etc had zero. And yeah, of course none of us had any clue what would become of AMD's in-house driver; typically when something is open-source, you don't have people gatekeeping community efforts of commonly requested features. Had that been known, RADV would have totally made sense. The thing is, that outcome wasn't going to be known, and you can't look at things in hindsight to say "I told you so" because I'm sure even you didn't know with certainty that things would pan out this way.

Side note: from what I recall in 2016, people's arguments in-favor of RADV was more of "why not" or "competition is good" (even though that isn't always true) or "I want open-source drivers now!" (because AMD was taking forever to release their stuff) or "make your own if you don't like it" (while failing to understand the underlying problem). There wasn't a compelling argument why the limited developer resources should have been spent on RADV as opposed to drivers like PanVK, V3DV, NVK, etc., which to my knowledge didn't exist back then and today could really use some help.
All of this is what I find so confusing, because the only GPUs I use are AMD and Intel, yet, I was the bad guy because I was vouching for the unsupported platforms.

[nuetzel]

it seems like there is a lot of this with polaris sadly

That's sadly my understanding, too.
Greetings,

Dieter

[shmerl]

That Russian "Triang3l" guy is such a genius!
Really hope the sanctions against the Russian regime won't cut him off from contributing to open-source projects one day...

More likely it could happen the other way - Russia will block access to something like Github or Gitlab because they aren't under their censorship (shooting themselves in the foot with that is expected, considering everything else Putin is doing). Many developers are leaving Russia while they can.