Radeon RADV Driver Lands Vulkan Dynamic Rendering Support

Landing in Mesa 22.0 on Sunday night was the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" support for the recently introduced VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension.

VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering premiered last month with Vulkan 1.2.197. This new extension allows for creating single-pass render pass instances without the need of creating render pass objects or frame-buffers.

The Khronos documentation on dynamic rendering explains, "If you’re not using multiple subpasses or input attachments though, go ahead, rip those render pass objects right out! Dynamic rendering offers similar rendering performance to a single pass render pass object but with a much simpler interface on all implementations. Hopefully this extension will make writing future Vulkan renderers just a bit more enjoyable."

The Khronos guidance around VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering can be found with their streamlining render passes blog post.

Intel has been preparing ANV for dynamic rendering as well as the recent RADV enablement work, along with the proprietary Vulkan drivers on Linux and Windows. NVIDIA for their part has offered a Vulkan beta driver with VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering support for Linux and Windows customers since the Vulkan 1.2.197 release date.

With this merge request that went into mainline on Sunday, VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering is exposed for RADV. This marks the first Mesa hardware Vulkan driver supporting VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering while the Lavapipe software/CPU-based implementation has already supported it.