GRVK 0.4 Released For Running AMD's Mantle API Over Vulkan

While AMD's Mantle graphics API development has been suspended for more than a half-decade already with the Vulkan API successfully taking off, the open-source GRVK project continues to let Mantle unofficially live on by re-implementing its interfaces over Vulkan.

GRVK was started during the pandemic last year and continues maturing in being a more capable Mantle implementation on top of Vulkan. With today's GRVK 0.4.0 release, this Mantle API re-implementation can now run the Star Swarm demo that was one of the original demos for showcasing this AMD API alternative to Direct3D 11 and OpenGL. While Star Swarm is now running with GRVK, the performance is admittedly very low at this point and there are other known issues.

Besides implementing bits to get Star Swarm running, GRVK 0.4 has stubbed out the "mantleaxl" extension library, made various fixes to the AMDIL compiler, and other improvements.

GRVK 0.4 has been tested successfully with the Radeon RADV and AMDVLK Vulkan drivers along with the Intel ANV driver. The NVIDIA proprietary Vulkan driver is still crashing early.

Those curious about this Mantle-on-Vulkan open-source community implementation can find out more about this technical challenge via GitHub.