AMDVLK Support For Navi Might Be Slightly Delayed

While there is the open-source OpenGL driver support in RadeonSI now part of Mesa 19.2 for the Radeon RX 5700 series launching on Sunday, for the open-source Vulkan driver support due to timing you might be needing to wait a little bit.

For the popular RADV Vulkan driver within Mesa that is led by Valve/Google/RedHat developers, there aren't any indications AMD provided any card samples or documentation in advance to these "community" developers. We're hopeful though that we'll still see some Navi 10 support for RADV in Mesa 19.2 that is going into feature freeze in early August and then releasing as stable a few weeks after that point. For now it's a waiting game.

On the AMDVLK front with their official AMD Vulkan driver that is shared-code in part with their Windows Vulkan driver, it looks like due to their internal/legal reviews, it might not be aligned exactly for launch day but hopefully just a few days behind. One of the AMD developers for this Vulkan driver commented, "We are doing IP scrub on the source code. Might be a little bit later than launch day."

With either Vulkan driver or for the RadeonSI OpenGL support, the AMDGPU bits going into Linux 5.3 are needed on the kernel side. For those looking towards an easy option until the open-source Linux support is ironed out, AMD should be rolling out their Radeon Software for Linux Open/Pro driver options with Navi support around 7 July. The main complaint with that driver though remains the limited Linux distributions/releases supported by it.