Mesa's Vulkan Drivers See More Extension Work Ahead Of The 19.1 Branching

Mesa 19.1 is due to be released at the end of May and for that to be the feature freeze is in two weeks followed by the weekly release candidates. With the feature development ending soon for this next quarterly Mesa release, the Radeon "RADV" and Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver developers in particular have been quite busy on their remaining feature work.

On the RADV front, this morning brought VK_EXT_inline_uniform_block support. This is the Vulkan extension to let uniform blocks be backed directly with descriptor sets.

Landing this week was also VK_KHR_shader_atomic_int64 support albeit disabled by default for the moment until the driver supports 64-bit compare/swap atomic operations.

Also on the RADV front this week was enabling VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8 with the enabling of Vulkan features shaderInt8 and then shaderFloat16, with that feature being limited to LLVM 8.0 and later for Volcanic Islands GPUs and newer.

Another RADV extension enabled last week was VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float when running on Volcanic Islands and newer paired with LLVM 8.0 or newer.

Meanwhile over in ANV space, the Intel Linux Vulkan driver now supports VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8 for Intel "Gen8" graphics and newer.

The Intel and Radeon Mesa Vulkan drivers are looking to be in good shape for the upcoming Mesa 19.1 space. Over on the Mesa OpenGL side, sadly, it doesn't look like OpenGL 4.6 will materialize in either i965 or RadeonSI for this Q2-2019 driver update.