AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 Brings Minor Improvements But No Vulkan Ray-Tracing Yet

AMD engineers today published AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 as their latest open-source public code drop of their official Linux Vulkan driver.

While this month AMD published a new Radeon Software packaged driver build with Vulkan ray-tracing support for Linux systems, that driver is binary-only. Now as their first AMDVLK update since that milestone, unfortunately, the ray-tracing support hasn't made it into this open-source driver yet.

There hasn't yet been any communication from AMD if/when they will provide Vulkan ray-tracing support in this official open-source driver. Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver is working on ray-tracing but that is a separate effort from AMD's official developments and will likely be some time before that RADV ray-tracing support is in suitable shape.

As for what's added with AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2, the Vulkan headers are now re-based to v1.2.174, support for dynamic enable of color writes, and partial nested command buffer support in the GpuDebug layer. There are also bug fixes around out-of-memory errors produced by AMDVLK when no AMD graphics card is installed, DCC issues, and some applications using LLVMpipe when running with the AMD switchable graphics layer.

The AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 sources along with binary builds for Ubuntu and RHEL/CentOS can be found via GitHub.