Open-Source Vulkan Driver Continues To Be Worked On For Old Radeon HD 6000 Series GPUs
One month ago I wrote about this experimental Vulkan driver for pre-GCN AMD GPUs that is being worked on by community open-source developer "Triang3l" as a new Mesa-based driver.
I haven't heard much of the effort then over the past few weeks but over the weekend there was some new progress to report. This early stage driver managed to get a small green sprite displayed:
Yes, a small but important milestone.
The developer followed up in adding:
"It's important thought that while many parts of this are "real" (command buffer submission, buffers and images, color attachment views, a tiiiny fraction of the pipeline state), shaders and most of the state are currently hard-coded. So far I haven't started integrating the SFN shader compiler, it'll need some changes in resource binding, but it will definitely be top-priority, as that, along with transfers, is necessary for even getting close to trying to pass the CTS tests."
Even if this Vulkan driver comes to pass and ends up being developed to the point of implementing Vulkan 1.0+, there still will be the issue of the Radeon HD 6000 series being quite old at this point and incapable of handling most modern games. But nevertheless this could prove to be a useful driver effort for enjoying Vulkan-based compositors and other lightweight Vulkan API usage, assuming the driver continues to be developed and mature over the months ahead.
17 Comments
