AMDVLK Dropped Vega While Mesa's RADV Is Continuing To Make Vega Faster In 2023

Last week with the AMDVLK 2023.Q4.1 driver, AMD removed support for Polaris and Vega GPUs from this official open-source Vulkan driver. But as mentioned this doesn't impact the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver maintained by Valve, Red Hat, and other open-source developers. In fact, this week another optimization for Vega/GFX9 was merged for Mesa 24.0-devel.

One week after AMD dropped GFX9/Vega (and Polaris) from their AMDVLK Vulkan driver, the RADV Vulkan driver within Mesa is continuing to see new optimizations for these aging GPUs. Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's stellar open-source Linux graphics driver team landed a change to adjust the binning settings for GFX9 hardware. In turn this should improve the performance on Vega with graphics cards like the Radeon RX Vega 56/64 and Radeon VII.

The binning setting adjustments for GFX9/Vega are based off changes AMD made to their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. AMD had discovered that binning adjustments made for GFX10 and newer (Navi) regressed prior settings for GFX9, so RadeonSI now takes that into account to set the proper binning setting whether on Vega or Navi.

This code was merged yesterday for RADV in Mesa 24.0-devel to improve the Vega performance while it also stands chances of being back-ported to the Mesa 23.3 series. It's great seeing the continual flow of Mesa improvements from Valve developers, even in cases of older GPUs.