AMDVLK 2023.Q4.2 Vulkan Driver Brings Ray-Tracing & SPIR-V Improvements

It's been just over one month since AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 and this morning it's been succeeded by a new AMD open-source Vulkan Linux driver release.

AMDVLK 2023.Q4.2 is out today for those preferring this open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver alternative to the more common RADV driver developed by Valve, Red Hat, Google, and the open-source community within Mesa. With AMDVLK 2023.Q4.2 comes more bug fixes as well as some new minor feature work. The release highlights include:

- Update Khronos Vulkan headers to 1.3.269
- Enable extension KHR_cooperative_matrix
- Support spriv binary without binding decoration
- Speed up slow clears with VRS
- Enable RT triangle pair compression

Bug Fixes:

- Performance drop observed in X-Plane with resize bar enabled
- CTS failure in dEQP-VK.ray_tracing_pipeline.misc.*
- CTS failure in dEQP-VK.dynamic_rendering.primary_cmd_buff.basic.partial_binding_depth_stencil
- ANGLE test failure in dEQP-GLES31.functional.image_load_store.3d*
- Log running out of GPU memory error for gpu profiler SQTT dumping

The KHR_cooperative_matrix support for SPIR-V cooperative matrix support for use within compute shaders may interest some users for machine learning use-cases. The other work is mostly a routine progression of this official open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver.

The source code along with RHEL and Ubuntu binaries of the AMDVLK 2023.Q4.2 Vulkan driver are available via GitHub.