It's Easy To Play With The RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver On Ubuntu 16.04

Now that the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is part of mainline Mesa, it's increasingly easy to experiment with this unofficial, open-source Vulkan driver on rolling-release distributions and through third-party package archives/repositories.

One of the popular choices for Linux gamers and enthusiasts on Ubuntu, the Padoka PPA, has added support for building the Radeon Vulkan driver with its most recent update over the weekend. The Padoka PPA is now building its Mesa packages with support for the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver to complement the existing Intel Vulkan (ANV) support. The Mesa Git code continues to be built against LLVM 3.0 SVN for the best AMDGPU LLVM back-end support too.

Thus Ubuntu users can simply do apt-add-repository ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/mesa && apt update && apt dist-upgrade. Easy as that!

This package archive is still important for users running the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 16.10 since it's unfortunately stuck to Mesa 12.0 and it's not shipping Vulkan support by default.

Check out my RADV benchmarks from last week plus some NVIDIA Vulkan comparison numbers and I'll be working on some fresh Linux Intel/Radeon/NVIDIA Vulkan benchmarks in the days ahead.