AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Exposes More Extensions, Optimizations & More Fixes

On Saturday was the latest code drop for the XGL component update to the AMDVLK open-source Linux Vulkan driver, which incorporates the work done internally by AMD developers on their official Vulkan driver code-base over the past number of days.

With this latest open-source driver update there is now AMD_shader_ballot and AMD_gpu_shader_half_float being exposed - both extensions being quite interesting and the shader ballot having been a work-in-progress for a while now on this driver.

This driver update also now exposes subgroup shuffle capabilities along with 16-bit and 64-bit arithmetic operations. The updated XGL code also now enables the application shader optimizer in the LLPC (LLVM Pipeline Compiler) code path. Other work include barrier optimizations, continuing with its workaround for Tomb Raider with Vulkan hanging, fixing a variety of bugs, and other small changes.

More details on these latest AMDVLK Vulkan driver updates via this Git commit. Some fresh RADV vs. AMDVLK benchmarks are currently being worked on for posting in the coming days.