AMDVLK 2022.Q1.1 Released With Radeon RX 6500 XT Support

After ending out 2021 with an AMDVLK update to fix poor performance on Wayland, AMD today issued AMDVLK 2022.Q1.1 with their first set of changes for the new year.

AMDVLK 2022.Q1.1 most notably introduces Navi 24 support, which is the entry-level RDNA2 GPU used by the Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card launching today. AMDVLK support is ready to go for today's Radeon RX 6500 series debut for that mainstream GPU offering.

AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT

The Radeon RX 6500 XT is expected to debut for for $199 USD but pricing details so far have shown it well above $300 USD in Internet retail channels.... We'll see in a few hours. Unfortunately the RX 6500 XT is limited to PCIe x4 usage, only has 4GB of vRAM, and also lacks AV1 decoding support. We'll see today how the pricing pans out and if there is much availability. I was not provided with any Radeon RX 6500 XT review sample, so cannot comment on the performance at this time. Only if able to find an RX 6500 XT close to MSRP will I bother picking one up if not receiving a review sample as overall not looking like an interesting card besides in these silicon shortage times.

In addition to Navi 24 support. there is improved ASTC software decoding. Newer AMD GPUs dropped ASTC texture compression hardware support but is software-based. This latest AMDVLK driver continues improving its Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression support.

No other changes are noted with today's AMDVLK 2022.Q1.1 Vulkan driver update. Source code along with Ubuntu and RHEL/CentOS binaries are available via GitHub.