AMDVLK Radeon Vulkan Driver Adds Transform Feedback, ~10% Vega Performance Boost

AMD's Vulkan driver developers have done their first fresh code drop of the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code in two weeks and it's a big push.

Highlights of the AMDVLK update pushed out this morning for those using this official Radeon Vulkan driver alternative to Mesa RADV includes:

- Their Vulkan transform feedback support appears in order. This is most notably useful for Wine/Proton Steam Play gamers with DXVK for mapping Direct3D to Vulkan. The Vulkan transform feedback support is necessary for handling Direct3D Stream-Out functionality. The RADV driver had already enabled this transform feedback support. (Update: It looks like the transform feedback support might not be fully implemented yet.)

- Enabling the on-chip GSVS ring for GFX9 (Vega) graphics hardware, which can yield up to a 10% performance gain. This is notable as AMDVLK with Vega was already generally performing better than the RADV driver.

- VK_EXT_scalar_block_layout support for C-like structure layouts for uniform and storage buffers.

- VK_KHR_swapchain_mutable_format support for allowing swapchain images of different formats to that of the underlying window system.

- Various multi-GPU and multi-monitor fixes.

- At least one Raven Ridge crash fix.

- The underlying PAL platform abstraction layer has added timeline semaphore support, release-acquire based barriers, profiling improvements, and other changes and fixes.

AMDVLK setup instructions for this latest code can be found here.