AMDVLK 2021.Q2.5 Released As A Minor Radeon Vulkan Driver Update

Following the last AMDVLK update at the end of May, AMD has released AMDVLK 2021.Q2.4 as their newest open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver release.

This AMDVLK 2021.Q2.5 release is fairly small and just rebuilds against the Vulkan 1.2.179 headers plus has two bug fixes. The fixes involve corruption while running Wayland render tests and a capture issue with the Radeon Graphics Profiler and RenderDoc.

Still not found in this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver is any ray-tracing support. AMD recently enabled Vulkan ray-tracing extensions within their packaged Radeon Software for Linux "PRO" driver stack where their official Vulkan driver continues to be built against their proprietary shader compiler. When it comes to the open-source AMDVLK using the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end, AMD hasn't yet publicly communicated if or when they plan to enable ray-tracing functionality. Separately, Mesa developers working on the RADV driver continue their own work on ray-tracing.

In any case for those making use of the AMDVLK driver this latest release in source form and Ubuntu / RHEL / CentOS binaries can be found via GitHub.