AMDVLK 2023.Q1.3 Released With Various Fixes, TMZ For RDNA2 & Newer

It's been nearly one month since AMDVLK 2023.Q1.2 as AMD's latest open-source Vulkan driver code drop while today it was replaced by AMDVLK 2023.Q1.3 as what will likely be their last Vulkan driver update for the quarter.

AMDVLK 2023.Q1.3 rebuilds against the Vulkan 1.3.241 upstream header files, adds support for sub-group operations in anyhit shaders, removing a restriction that PM4 and ELF dumping can only be used in RADV builds where assert is enabled, and adding TMZ support for Navi 2x GPUs and newer.

TMZ in the context of the AMD Radeon graphics driver stack is the Trusted Memory Zone functionality. TMZ protects the contents of select pages from being read by the CPU or other non-GPU clients and preventing writes from happening to TMZ-protected pages. This basic encryption of pages can be done for various security/trust reasons. Other open-source Radeon driver code like the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has supported this functionality while now it's working for RADV with RDNA2 and newer GPUs too.

The AMDVLK 2023.Q1.3 driver also has various bug fixes such as flickering experienced within the Saints Row V game, Vulkan CTS (Conformance Test Suite) failures, GPU profiler issues, and a 5~10% performance regression when building with the GCC 9 compiler.

This isn't the most exciting AMDVLK driver update for one month's worth of work and in comparison to all the Mesa RADV driver changes seen on a near daily basis. In any event those wanting to fetch this latest open-source driver code can find the new release up on GitHub.