AMDVLK 2021.Q2.1 Finally Adds Navi 12 Support

The official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver, AMDVLK, is out today with its first update of the new quarter.

Most notable with AMDVLK 2021.Q2.1 is now officially supporting the Navi 12 SKU. Navi 12 so far is just found with the Radeon Pro 5600M for the Apple MacBook Pro 16 as well as the AMD Radeon Pro V520. But now these months later, Navi 12 support has finally worked its way into AMDVLK. Given the timing it does make us wonder if AMD is potentially set to introduce new Navi 12 SKUs soon. There was the recently-reported VCN-less, seemingly crypto/mining focused Navi 12 GPU device ID added to the kernel. Perhaps this AMDVLK support is coming for that for Vulkan compute workloads? Time will tell, but in any case the Navi 12 support is finally added to the open-source AMDVLK driver for Linux.

The AMDVLK 2021.Q2.1 driver also now enables their recently added AMD switchable graphics layer as well as provides some fixes there.

AMDVLK 2021.Q2.1 additionally updates the Vulkan headers against the 1.2.173 specification and has some memory leak fixes in tow. Still missing from the AMDVLK driver is support for the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions with the latest Radeon RX 6000 series hardware.

AMDVLK 2021.Q2.1 source and binaries for Ubuntu/RHEL systems can be downloaded from GitHub.