AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1: Polaris & Vega Support Dropped, Counter-Strike 2 Tuning

AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 was published today as AMD's first Radeon Vulkan open-source driver update since last month. There comes some new features and improvements with this version but they have also decided to drop Polaris (GFX8) and Vega (GFX9) graphics support.

The open-source AMDVLK driver has ended support for aging GFX8/GFX9 graphics hardware. Those running still with Polaris or Vega graphics cards will no longer find AMDVLK support with the new releases. You can either stick to AMDVLK 2023.Q3 and older or the better option is to simply use the community-maintained Mesa RADV driver. It's unlikely GFX8/GFX9 support will be removed from the RADV Vulkan driver anytime soon and similarly the AMDGPU kernel driver support still is there upstream. Considering Mesa continues to see occasional work going back to the ATI R300 Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver and the kernel driver support even for old ATI Radeon GPUs is still maintained, the open-source support is still likely to continue outside of the AMDVLK scope.

The AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 does bring performance tuning for Counter-Strike 2 as well as Baldur's Gate 3 and Enscape running under Valve's Steam Play. There is also a 128BPP fast-clear performance optimization for the Linux native port of Total War: WARHAMMER III.

The AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 driver also optimizes MSAA clears, adds an option to control SPIR-V NoContract backward and forward propagation and updating against the Vulkan API 1.3.267 headers. There are also Vulkan driver fixes around conformance test suite (CTS) failures and a KHR_fragment_shader_barycentric bug when using tessellation shaders.

Downloads and more details on today's AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 Vulkan driver update via GitHub.