Radeon News Archives

While the hope remains that GPU resets are a very infrequent task, AMD Linux driver engineers have recently been working on the ability to support a per-queue GC reset capability for more precise reset capabilities when needed.

The latest video acceleration improvements to report on with the open-source AMD Radeon driver front is support in Mesa 24.3-devel for passing HDR metadata in the AV1 encoder.

We appear to be on the heels of the AMD ROCm 6.2 software release for advancing the open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compute stack with new features.

It looks like the AMD RDNA4 "GFX12" graphics driver support is in good shape: AMD is now enabling the driver support for the next-generation graphics "out of the box" with the latest pending patches.

While there have been various efforts like HIPIFY to help in translating CUDA source code to portable C++ code for AMD GPUs and then the previously-AMD-funded ZLUDA to allow CUDA binaries to run on AMD GPUs via a drop-in replacement to CUDA libraries, there's a new contender in town: SCALE. SCALE is now public as a GPGPU toolchain for allowing CUDA programs to be natively run on AMD graphics processors.

Last week it was noted AMD would be squeezing in more patches for "new IPs" to "get them tied off" with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle. This is principally about RDNA4 support and sure enough on Friday more patches were submitted to DRM-Next.

There have been ongoing reports from a variety of users and systems around high power use during GPU-accelerated video playback with current-generation AMD Ryzen "Phoenix" laptops. Fortunately, an optimization is coming to benefit Phoenix and forthcoming Strix Point laptops with noticeably lower power consumption during video playback.

Over the years there have been various attempts at getting the open-source RADV Vulkan driver on Windows, Faith Ekstrand of Collabora has been recently hacking on it and achieving success for having this popular Radeon Vulkan API driver for Linux working under Windows.

AMD's GPUOpen group this morning released the FidelityFX SDK 1.1 version that incorporates FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 (FSR 3.1) as the newest version of their game upscaling tech. Plus it introduces new components in the form of the Breadcrumbs Library and Brixelizer.

While Linux 6.10-rc7 is due out this weekend and it's usually around the -rc6 timeframe when is the effective new material cut-off to DRM-Next of new graphics/display driver code aiming for the next kernel cycle, AMD is working to squeeze a bit more in for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.

The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa 24.2-devel has received support for task shaders with the NVIDIA Device Generated Commands "DGC" extension.

AMD's Radeon Developer Tool Suite from their GPUOpen group has now migrated to the Qt6 graphical toolkit.

AMD on Friday sent out another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD patches for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window opening up in about two weeks.

AMD today published version 1.4.34 of its Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK. This accelerated multimedia framework is used on Linux and Windows for integrating with games/applications leveraging DirectX, OpenGL, and OpenCL with interoperability support for Radeon GPU customers.

AMD has published AMDVLK 2024.Q2.3 as the newest version of their open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems.

Related to the work by Mike Blumenkrantz for significantly improving the Mesa glReadPixels performance by more than 100%, the open-source driver developer at Valve has now enabled compute PBO blits within mainline Mesa for the AMD Radeon "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver.

On Friday more AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes were submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle by way of DRM-Next. We're nearing the end of feature work to DRM-Next before the Linux 6.11 merge window begins in mid-July while this latest AMD pull request continues preparing for upcoming RDNA4 graphics hardware among other changes.

As written about this morning, AMD announced ROCm 6.1.3 with multi-GPU support, beta support for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), Radeon PRO W7900 Dual Slot compatibility, and TensorFlow framework qualification support. The upstream ROCm code on GitHub as of writing continues pointing only to the prior ROCm 6.1.2 software but there is now a Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver offering up ROCm 6.1.3.

A set of patches were posted on Monday in aiming to get aging AMD Radeon GFX7/GFX8 era graphics processors working on Loongson LoongArch platforms. These patches for handling old Radeon Hawaii~Polaris GPUs on Loongson point to a "massive platform bug" with these domestic Chinese systems.

A lot of AMD GFX12 IP enablement landed in Mesa 24.2-devel over the past week for bringing up the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and RADV Vulkan driver for the upcoming RDNA4 graphics.

In addition to debuting their "Peano" LLVM compiler back-end for Ryzen AI NPUs on Friday, AMD also submitted a new batch of feature code for their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver of new feature code aiming for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window.

When it comes to the RDNA 3.5 / RDNA 3+ integrated graphics found with upcoming AMD products, the graphics driver IP has been referred to as "GFX1150" and "GFX1151" of the AMD GFX 11.5 graphics IP. But now appearing today within the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler is a new GFX1152 variant.

AMD has published a new set of AMDGPU firmware binaries for Linux users. In particular, this should benefit AMD APUs the most and these firmware improvements were focused on Valve's Steam Deck to make the device more robust against buggy applications.

Building off last month's AMDVLK 2024.Q2.1 driver adding Phoenix 2 support, AMD today released AMDVLK 2024.Q2.2 as the newest update to their official open-source Vulkan Linux driver.

ROCm 6.1.2 is out today as the newest update to AMD's open-source GPU compute stack for Linux systems and with growing support for Windows Subsystem for Linux.

AMD is hiring engineers to work on build and packaging of their "AMD Unified Linux Driver" to enhance the experience of deploying their packaged graphics driver stack -- including ROCm -- across different Linux distributions.

While the AMD Ryzen 9000 series (Zen 5) details are arguably the most exciting aspect of Lisa Su's keynote at Computex 2024, over on the Radeon side is the announcement of the AMD Radeon PRO W7900 Dual Slot graphics card intended for compact workstations and Gen AI.

It's been another busy week with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack with continued preparations around enabling support for next-generation RDNA4 graphics (as well as continued RDNA3+ / RDNA 3.5 tuning).

Last month we began seeing AMDGPU driver firmware files published for the rumored "RDNA3+" hardware as an RDNA3 refresh (also as "RDNA 3.5") for upcoming APUs. More firmware files have now landed public in linux-firmware.git for these forthcoming RDNA3 refresh products.

AMD by way of their GPUOpen group have released version 3.1 of the open-source Vulkan Memory Allocator.

An end-user and Phoronix reader has taken up creating his own AMD ROCm SDK build system to make it easier to setup a machine learning software stack from scratch on AMD Radeon GPUs under Linux. This open-source build system pulls in the AMD ROCm source code as well as AMD GPU-accelerated tools like PyTorch and ONNX and makes it easier to deploy and without having to rely on Docker or other solutions.

Sneaking in as a "fix" for the Linux 6.10 kernel is an enhancement to the AMDKFD kernel compute driver used by the ROCm compute stack for better supporting small Ryzen APUs like client and embedded SoCs.

Famed open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has landed 13 more patches in Mesa 24.2-devel to provide fixes for GFX12 (RDNA4) graphics IP while also adding more GFX11 (RDNA3) APUs.

It was just earlier this month that AMD Linux kernel graphics driver patches appeared for introducing a new ISP hardware block for Image Signal Processing with new AMD APUs. Already the AMDGPU ISP firmware has appeared in linux-firmware.git indicating that this "ISP" block may be coming in hardware quite soon if not already quietly found within some products.

Back in February I wrote about AMD having quietly funded the effort for a drop-in CUDA implementation for AMD GPUs built atop the ROCm library. This was an incarnation of ZLUDA that originally began as a CUDA implementation for Intel GPUs using oneAPI Level Zero. While AMD discontinued funding ZLUDA development earlier this year, this CUDA implementation for AMD GPUs is continuing to see some new code activity.

It's been the better part of two months since the last AMDVLK driver update while today the AMDVLK 2024.Q2.1 driver has been christened.

Following all of the GFX12 code and related IP landing within the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver as well as the LLVM AMDGPU shader compiler back-end and other code in enabling the next-generation of AMD Radeon graphics, the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support for RDNA4 (GFX12) was merged this Sunday into Mesa.

As expected, AMD today published the Micro Engine Scheduler "MES" firmware documentation for RDNA3 graphics processors as part of better engaging with the open-source community and aiming to address some gaps in their open-source GPU compute stack.

The AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver has seen a new patch series preparing enablement of a new hardware intellectual property (IP) block for the first time: the ISP.

Following the release of ROCm 6.1 just under one month ago, ROCm 6.1.1 was published today as the newest point release to deliver various bug fixes and other minor improvements to this open-source GPU compute stack.

Prominent open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has merged a new tantalizing set of patches that boost the 3D texturing performance for those using RDNA1 GPUs and older.

On top of prior DRM-Next pull requests for the AMD kernel graphics driver working on next-gen GPU support along with fixes and other low-level improvements, on Friday another batch of new feature code was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window opening up in mid-May.

It was just a few days ago that Llamafile 0.8 released with LLaMA 3 and Grok support along with faster F16 performance. Now this project out of Mozilla for self-contained, easily re-distributable large language model (LLM) deployments is out with a new release.

AMD's Linux graphics driver engineers continue being quite busy preparing for multiple new hardware IP.

Down to literally minutes before the Mesa 24.1 codebase was branched for making up this quarter's Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver to then be tested and stabilized with a stable release around mid-May, a number of AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver patches were merged.

AMD's GPUOpen team today released the Radeon GPU Profiler 2.1 software that now sports interoperability with the Radeon GPU Analyzer.

LACT 0.5.4 is out as the open-source and independently developed "Linux AMDGPU Control Application" for this community AMD Linux graphics driver control panel option given the lack of any official Radeon GUI management solution from AMD.

After recently announcing they'd be working to get out Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware documentation and open-source code, AMD said they would be working to open-source more of their software stack and hardware documentation. AMD repeated those calls over the weekend.

This weekend AMD upstreamed a number of new AMDGPU firmware files into the linux-firmware.git repository that serves as a basis for all of the binary firmware/microcode files used by the Linux kernel drivers. This big set of new AMDGPU firmware files is likely for the upcoming RDNA 3.5 / "RDNA3 refresh" / RDNA3+ as it appears will be called updated RDNA3 graphics for upcoming AMD Ryzen SoCs.

The past year there's been an independent open-source driver developer working on "Terakan" as a Vulkan driver for old Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs. These pre-GCN GPUs never received any official Vulkan driver support from AMD but thanks to open-source and a strong desire to pull off such a feat, Vitaliy Kuzmin "Triang3l" has been pursuing this challenge and has been pulling off some basic results. The work so far has been predominantly been carried out with the open-source Linux graphics stack while this weekend the Terakan driver was demonstrated under Microsoft Windows.