Radeon News Archives

Over the summer the AMDGPU compiler back-end in upstream LLVM began with new targets for GFX1150 and GFX1151 which given all things known are likely the "RDNA3 Refresh" APUs. That work started out light with not much in the way of different code paths from the existing GFX11 support but we're beginning to see some new instructions added for the RDNA3 refresh graphics processors.

ROCm 5.7 was released on Friday with the introduction of a new "hipTensor" library, the ROCgdb debugger being extended with Fortran and OMPD support, and new optimizations to the rocRAND and MIVisionX libraries. AMD has also announced end-of-support for the AMD Instinct MI50 accelerator while not yet formally announcing any new RDNA3 GPU support.

The past two years AMD's AMDGPU Linux kernel driver has supported Seamless Boot on Van Gogh APUs notably used by Valve's Steam Deck. AMD Seamless Boot is for a seamless or flicker-free boot experience by aiming to avoid redundant/unnecessary mode-sets by the driver. After a few years being limited in its scope of supported hardware, new patches are aiming to open up Seamless Boot usage to more AMD Radeon graphics hardware.

AOMP 18.0-0 has been released as the newest version of AMD's LLVM/Clang compiler downstream that is focused on providing the very latest patches around Radeon OpenMP GPU offloading and goes along with their ROCm compute stack.

As covered in the launch-day Radeon RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT Linux review/testing, there is already upstream open-source driver support for these new RDNA3 graphics cards in recent versions of the Linux kernel and Mesa. It's a pleasant open-source out-of-the-box experience with the Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards with the possible exception of just needing to grab the recent AMDGPU firmware. But for those running older, enterprise Linux distribution releases, AMD has now released the Radeon Software for Linux 23.20 driver package to also enable the RX 7700/7800 XT support on those enterprise operating systems.

With the in-development Linux 6.6 kernel adding support for more upcoming Radeon graphics processors, that means more auto-generated header files for the new IP blocks... I was curious to see the overall size now of the AMDGPU kernel driver along with its associated code like the AMDKFD compute driver. It's now above 5 million lines for the kernel driver portion.

AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are working on a new set of interfaces for user-space to support OverDrive overclocking. While AMD GPU OverDrive overclocking has been supported on Linux for years, the current interface isn't sufficient for all the power/overclocking controls moving forward.

Last week AMD sent out initial patches for enabling the "GFX 11.5" graphics IP under Linux for this presumed RDNA3 refresh that is likely for their next-gen Ryzen 8000 series APUs. Today AMD open-source Linux driver engineers sent out DCN 3.5 patches as an updated version of their Display Core Next IP.

On Friday AMD sent out another pull request of AMDGPU/AMDKFD driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.6 merge window. With the Linux 6.5 release due out likely in one week and the cut-off having passed for new "feature" code for DRM-Next, this latest AMDGPU pull request was centered around bug-fixes but also with a few minor additions.

Melissa Wen with consulting firm Igalia continues working with AMD and Valve engineers on supporting AMD driver-specific color management properties for Linux to benefit the Steam Deck but ultimately to benefit all AMD Linux users as well.

While over the past several years AMD landed numerous significant improvements to their RadeonSI driver for benefiting OpenGL workstation use-cases, that quest isn't yet over and more optimizations continue to be pursued. There are additional optimizations on the horizon for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for benefiting OpenGL on Linux workstations.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver ray-tracing support is about to become much faster with a pending improvement that is currently undergoing review.

AMD submitted more "new stuff" for their AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics and compute drivers for the upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel cycle.

A decade ago the Radeon R600g SB shader back-end proved useful for boosting gaming performance on pre-GCN graphics cards of the time and proved useful. But in more recent years in the R600g switch to NIR, the SB path hasn't received much attention and its benefits have diminished. The R600g SB code has now been dropped.

AMDVLK 2023.Q3.1 is out this morning as the first update to AMD's official open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver since mid-June.

Earlier this year AMD introduced the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7800/W7900 series while today the company is introduced the Radeon PRO W7500 and W7600 series at the lower-end of the professional graphics spectrum.

Sent out today was a batch of "new stuff" for the AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics drivers for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.6 merge window opening in about one month.

This afternoon AMD announced the availability of the HIP SDK for Microsoft Windows as a portion of their ROCm computing platform with support for various professional and consumer GPUs.

There's been talk of new Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards this quarter and adding some weight to that is AMD publishing several new firmware files for different intellectual property blocks of IP versions previously not seeing firmware binaries in the linux-firmware.git repository.

As part of AMD's recent Linux graphics driver development approach of enabling new GPU support gradually on a IP block-by-block basis rather than big monolithic patch series marked by colorful fishy codenames, it's worked out well for getting new hardware support rolling into the kernel early and without revealing any combined details on yet-to-be-released graphics processors. This week has seen some new IP block patches surface.

Qiang Yu continues leading the charge on integrating the ACO compiler back-end into the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as an optional alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end.

New AMDGPU targets seeing the initial plumbing merged today for LLVM 17 are GFX1150 and GFX1151 as upcoming AMD APU products.

Last month AMD Linux kernel driver patches revealed a new feature called FreeSync Panel Replay that is basically an improvement over Panel Self Refresh (PSR) for laptop displays. That code didn't make it for the recently-closed v6.5 merge window but this week AMD engineers did post a second iteration of the patches.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" supports native hardware ray-tracing with RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics cards where it's matured quite nicely over the past number of months. With the upcoming Mesa 23.2, RADV RT support is enabled by default for all supported GPUs. RADV also has emulated ray-tracing support for older generations of AMD GPUs and as of today it's finally hit a 100% pass rate.

Last month The RADV ray-tracing pipelines support was enabled by default but then later disabled for VanGogh APUs, notably the Steam Deck. Now though with the latest ray-tracing code in Mesa 23.2-devel the RADV driver is no longer blocking the support for VanGogh.

AMD has issued a formal announcement now for the ROCm 5.6 compute stack release that was already covered on Phoronix earlier today. In AMD's announcement of ROCm 5.6 though there is a tease of what's to come later this year...

It was just one month ago that ROCm 5.5.1 debuted while overnight AMD has promoted ROCm 5.6 to stable with more improvements and a particular focus on enhancing the AI capabilities for Radeon GPUs and Instinct accelerators. The ROCm 5.6 release also arrives just two weeks after AMD CEO Lisa Su re-affirmed their support for ROCm and working with the community to further enhance it.

Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver has merged support for VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock, which is a highly sought after extension by game emulators and also important for DirectX over Vulkan layering efforts and more.

On a quest toward trying to get the game Halo Infinite running under Linux via Steam Play (Proton) with AMD GFX6 / GCN 1.0 era graphics processors, Valve's prolific open-source driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset has added VK_NV_device_generated_commands support for these original Radeon GCN GPUs.

AMDVLK 2023.Q2.3 is out today as the newest snapshot of AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver.

FreeSync Panel Replay is a new feature for AMD Ryzen laptops with the DCN v3.1.4 display block or newer for helping to reduce power usage when the screen contents are unchanged.

For some months now RADV ray-tracing has been enabled on a per-game basis while finally today in a change for next quarter's Mesa 23.2 release is RADV ray-tracing support being exposed by default for all software.

In recent months AMD open-source graphics driver engineers seem to be taking more interest in supporting the Xen hypervisor with their graphics hardware. It's not clear yet externally if this is just due to customer demand or other yet-to-be-announced interest in Xen.

AMD engineer Qiang Yu has recently been working on bringing support for Valve's ACO compiler from RADV over to the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver as an alternative to using the default AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler. More code has landed this week in furthering the effort.

While there is already RadeonSI driver support for the Rust OpenCL "Rusticl" implementation in Mesa since v23.1, merged now for Mesa 23.2 is experimental support for Rusticl with the older Radeon R600g for pre-GCN graphics cards.

Mesa 23.1's RADV driver added initial support for Vulkan Video with select video formats while now a set of patches have been merged to Mesa 23.2-devel for making the H.265 (HEVC) decoding more robust.

Back in March the AMD Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1 finished transitioning to HIP for using AMD's HIP C++ interface rather than OpenCL for newer Radeon GPUs. Following that, the Radeon ProRender plug-ins have also now finished being converted over to using HIP on AMD Radeon Vega (GFX9) GPUs and newer.

On Friday a big set of patches affecting the AMDGPU/Radeon/AMDKFD kernel drivers were submitted for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 6.5 kernel merge window opens in the coming weeks. A lot of new feature code is part of this pull for benefiting new hardware, continuing to refine AMD GPU power management under Linux, and more.

For those interested in GPU overclocking, AMD has posted the patches for implementing the "legacy" OverDrive overclocking infrastructure for newer SMU13-based Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards with the AMDGPU open-source Linux kernel driver.

AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have out a rather significant set of patches this week to their display code "DC" for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

Following the release at the start of the month of ROCm 5.5, today it's been succeeded by the ROCm 5.5.1 point release.

Melissa Wen of Igalia along with developers from AMD and Valve have been working on improved AMD color management support with a particular focus on the Steam Deck but will also benefit other AMD Radeon Linux users as well.

The Radeon Software for Linux driver was quietly updated earlier this month with one noted fix.

It's been over one month since the release of AMDVLK 2023.Q2.1 while today it's been succeeded by the AMDVLK 2023.Q2.2 update.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has implemented smooth lines support for in turn to be leveraged by the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed a new set of patches for Mesa 23.2 that are further optimizing the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for lower overhead in some code paths.

There's a new open-source Vulkan driver in development by an independent developer that is working on providing support for aging Radeon HD 6000 series "Northern Islands" graphics processors.

Beginning today with the newest Mesa 23.2-devel code, the environment variable option AMD_DEBUG=useaco is now available for telling the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to use Valve's ACO shader compiler back-end rather than the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end for supported shader types.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for the small but useful VK_EXT_tooling_info extension.

Going back to last year there's been AMD GFX940 work within the LLVM compiler for its AMDGPU compiler back-end. That AMD GFX940 should align to the Instinct MI300 while introduced to the latest LLVM compiler code today are new GFX941 and GFX942 targets.