AMDVLK Linux Driver Updated For Vulkan 1.1.82, Conservative Rasterization

The AMD developers responsible for maintaining the "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver that shares common code with their Windows driver have done another weekly code push of their newest bits.

With the XGL code drop this week there is now updates for Vulkan 1.1.82 where as previously Vulkan 1.1.77 was the exposed API version. Vulkan 1.1.82 was released at the end of July with various updates.

This code update also introduces support for the VK_EXT_conservative_rasterization extension, but only the primitive over-estimation functionality is currently supported. VK_EXT_conservative_rasterization was introduced back in Vulkan 1.0.67 from January and allows for over-estimation or under-estimation as part of limiting the rasterization process and ensuring more certainty over the driver's rendering behavior.

On the PAL (Platform Abstraction Layer) side they have managed to fix some F1 2017 corruption as well as other fixes. In general the rest of this week's XGL / PAL / SPVGEN / LLPC changes are random fixes to this driver code.

Instructions for building the AMDVLK driver on Linux are available via this GitHub documentation.

Also coming out of the AMD GPUOpen group this week is the Radeon GPU Profiler 1.3 release. Nothing too exciting in v1.3 but work under the hood for what they say will be some "big features and changes coming in future releases."