RADV Vulkan Driver Enables NGG For AMD VanGogh APUs

Up to now the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has only enabled Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) support by default for discrete graphics cards. But now that requirement is lifted for supporting NGG on forthcoming GFX10.3 (RDNA 2) APUs.

The forthcoming and very exciting VanGogh APUs will now see NGG enabled when running on the RADV Vulkan driver, similar to a previous change made for the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver.

This change was made by Valve's Samuel Pitoiset as "according to RadeonSI, VanGogh benefits." They are making this change in following the default AMD driver behavior. RADV being developed outside of AMD and without their official backing is left following AMD's other open-source efforts (RadeonSI, the AMDVLK driver, AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler, etc) in making changes to RADV+ACO for hardware ahead of launch.

The change isn't explicit for VanGogh but applies to all future hardware at this point. The change is dropping the dedicated video memory check, besides the GFX10 (Navi) and newer requirement.

It will be interesting to see how much NGG helps out with VanGogh when these APUs begin shipping next year. Van Gogh is expected to feature Navi 2 / RDNA2 graphics, Zen 2 CPU cores, and support (LP)DDR5 memory. Also coming next year as soon as CES in January is the Cezanne mobile APUs with Zen 3 CPU cores and Vega graphics.