AMD Pushes Updated AMDVLK Vulkan Code Following Adrenalin 2020 Unveil

Earlier this week AMD unveiled the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver and we await a Radeon Software for Linux / AMDGPU-PRO driver update for Linux users on supported distributions. But AMD has begun pushing some updated AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code ahead of a possible tagged release in the next few days.

AMD has begun pushing some new code to their AMDVLK source repositories as their official albeit less popular than RADV Vulkan driver (at least when it comes to popularity among Linux gamers). Their last tagged release was AMDVLK 2019.Q4.3 at the end of November and now off their week/bi-weekly cadence, hopefully we'll see a new tagged release tomorrow or before the Christmas holidays at least.

In looking through the latest Git code following the Adrenalin 2020 embargo lifting, some of their latest Vulkan driver commits include:

- VK_EXT_pipeline_creation_feedback support. (This was mentioned in the previous tagged release albeit the code commit from some 17 hours ago as of writing says the extension is now introduced.) This extension has been part of the Vulkan spec since March and is a means of feedback to the game/application about pipeline creation details.

- Subgroup cluster support.

- The shader optimizer has been better tuned for Dawn of War III.

- Pipeline cache improvements.

- Various Navi/GFX10 Changes.

Until the next tagged release there aren't any convenient Ubuntu/Debian binaries but those building AMDVLK from source can do so via GitHub. Also waiting to see when the next Radeon Software for Linux (PRO) driver release will happen and what it will bring, but at least on the Adrenalin 2020 press calls, there wasn't any Linux items to mention. Then again, we see a lot of great open-source work from the Radeon team frequently and Linux gamers generally not looking for much else besides possibly a GUI control panel.