AMDVLK Still Hasn't Yet Adopted FreeSync Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 18 June 2019 at 07:50 AM EDT. 18 Comments
RADEON
While the AMDGPU kernel driver has shipped with the long-awaited FreeSync support since the Linux 5.0 release earlier this year and was quickly wired up for the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver in Mesa 19.0 while the recent Mesa 19.1 update brought FreeSync for the RADV Vulkan driver, AMDVLK as AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver isn't yet supporting this variable rate refresh technology.

It's a bit ironic that the AMDVLK Vulkan driver still hasn't done its bit of hooking into the AMDGPU FreeSync support even though the code-base is partially shared with their Windows driver and the unofficial Mesa-based "RADV" Vulkan driver is already shipping with this feature in place. When looking through the latest AMDVLK code, the FreeSync functionality remains absent.

For those interested, there is this public tracker bug / feature request about seeing AMDVLK FreeSync support.

While FreeSync may be lacking, AMDVLK still is performing competitive for Linux gaming. You can see these RADV vs. AMDVLK benchmarks from the end of May. Once Navi support rolls out to both Vulkan drivers, it will be interesting for benchmarking as well -- including the third option, using the packaged Radeon Software "PRO" driver that still appears to be using their proprietary shader compiler rather than the LLVM back-end.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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