AMDVLK 2019.Q1.8 Enables Six More Vulkan Extensions, Fixes Bugs

The AMD driver developers maintaining the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan Linux driver did a "Pi day" driver update that is quite exciting as it enables six new extensions, with the most notable being that transform feedback appears to be officially advertised.

This new AMDVLK update is version 2019.Q1.8 and incorporates their latest driver sources for roughly the past two weeks. The six new Vulkan extensions now being advertised as enabled are VK_KHR_vulkan_memory_model, VK_EXT_depth_clip_enable, VK_KHR_depth_stencil_resolve, VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8, VK_EXT_debug_utils extension, and VK_EXT_transform_feedback. Those are some big additions notably with the Vulkan Memory Model, float16_int8, EXT_debug_utils being useful for debugging, and transform feedback. Previous AMDVLK drivers have mentioned VK_EXT_transform_feedback while now it appears in this AMDVLK 2019.Q1.8 release it's now officially ready, which is great news particularly for Linux gamers using Steam Play with DXVK.

AMDVLK 2019.Q1.8 also has a fall-back to use its internal shader cache in the case of a Vulkan pipeline cache miss, fixes a hang after the loading screen with The Witcher 3 running under DXVK, Rise of the Tomb Raider should no longer crash when the AMDVLK driver is built with GCC7, a dynamic loop unroll crash, a Dota 2 stuttering/performance fix, and other fixes.

Overall this is quite a big AMDVLK Vulkan driver update just ahead of the Game Developers' Conference (GDC) kicking off next week in San Francisco. This new AMDVLK release can be downloaded from GitHub and does offer up its Ubuntu packaged driver build for those wanting to try out this "official" AMD open-source Vulkan driver alternative to Mesa's RADV. Some fresh benchmarks will come in soon on Phoronix.