RADV In Mesa 18.1 Git Receiving New Vulkan Extension Work

In addition to receiving Vega 12 support in the past few hours, the RADV Vulkan driver living within Mesa has landed the latest extension work.

Valve open-source Linux driver developer Samuel Pitoiset has merged VK_EXT_sampler_filter_minmax support. That extension was added back during Vulkan 1.0.53. I'm not aware of any Vulkan game/program currently requiring VK_EXT_sampler_filter_minmax so it will be interesting to see if it wiring it up was done simply for scratching another item off the list or will be a requirement for any forthcoming Linux games. This extension is just enabled for GCN 1.1 Sea Islands and newer with GCN 1.0 behavior said to be buggy.

Daniel Schürmann meanwhile over the course of several patches added VK_AMD_shader_trinary_minmax support. VK_AMD_shader_trinary_minmax adds the SPIR-V AMD_texture_gather_bias_lod extension and lets an application query formats to be used with the functions provided by the texture_gather_bias_lod SPIR-V extension. This extension does appear to be used by Wolfenstein / DOOM with Vulkan under Windows, so may be useful for Wine Linux gamers.

This latest feature work will be found in next quarter's Mesa 18.1 release.