RADV Vulkan Driver Makes A Few More Improvements For GCN 1.0/1.1 Hardware

Valve open-source driver developer Samuel Pitoiset has contributed some improvements to Mesa 20.1's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver benefiting GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards.

These original GCN graphics cards are compatible with the RADV driver but require first switching the kernel driver from the default Radeon DRM driver over to the AMDGPU driver, normally via the radeon.si_support=0 radeon.cik_support=0 amdgpu.si_support=1 amdgpu.cik_support=1 kernel flags. After doing so, RADV has tended to work well with these aging GCN graphics cards -- especially more recently with the RADV ACO back-end now working back to GCN 1.0 for offering better performance.

But with GCN 1.0/1.1 on RADV seeing not much development attention, some Vulkan extensions haven't been supported or flipped on going back to Southern Islands hardware for lack of testing. But Pitoiset landed some improvements in this area today.

GFX6/GC7 (GCN 1.0/1.1) now supports VK_NV_compute_shader_derivatives, VK_EXT_sampler_filter_minmax, and shader storage image multi-sample as more Vulkan features working on these GPUs.

These RADV additions and other work will be part of the Mesa 20.1 release due out in late April or early May. Mesa 20.0 meanwhile as this quarter's Mesa3D series is expected to be released in the days ahead.