RADV Lands AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 Fix For DOOM Eternal On Linux Under Steam Play

Doom Eternal was released this week by id Software as their first game atop the Vulkan-focused id Tech 7 engine. While it's another id Software game not seeing a native Linux port, with some tweaking the game can run under Steam Play / Proton. And now Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver has landed a fix for AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPUs with a fix allowing those older graphics cards to handle this latest Doom title.

DOOM Eternal currently carries a bronze ranking on ProtonDB.com off 83 reports. With using PROTON_NO_ESYNC and some other tweaks and potentially a non-standard Proton build for now, DOOM Eternal can run on Linux. The performance results appear mixed as reported by users at this stage.

Id Tech 7 is a Vulkan-only engine with id Software having dropped its OpenGL renderer. On the Radeon side, RADV using the default AMDGPU LLVM back-end is required with the ACO back-end not yet working for this game. But we suspect in the very near future, ACO will be working great with DOOM Eternal. Or it also appears AMDGPU-PRO is working too for this game.

But when using the RADV driver, if trying on GFX6/GC7 (GCN 1.0/1.1 era GPUs like the Radeon HD 7000 series), the game would crash at start-up.

A fix was merged to Mesa 20.1-devel today and also queued for back-porting to Mesa 19.3/20.0 series for GFX6/GFX7. That fix is for simply exposing the VK_KHR_8bit_storage extension.

The RADV driver doesn't support VK_KHR_8bit_storage functionality itself for these oldest GPUs on the RADV driver, but simply exposing the extension is enough to avoid the game crashing at start. Performance though for GCN 1.0/1.1 with this 2020 high profile game will be challenging on Linux but at least it's a working option now for gamers on these old GPUs.

Once the DOOM Eternal support further matures with Steam Play / Proton and the RADV+ACO state, I'll work on some benchmarks of this game.