Open-Source Radeon Vulkan Driver "RADV" Demonstrated On Windows

Last week at the X.Org Developer's Conference (XDC2024) in Montreal there was a talk showcasing Mesa's open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver running atop Windows 11.

As covered a few months ago on Phoronix, Faith Ekstrand of Collabora has been experimenting with the RADV Vulkan driver on Windows. Ekstrand presented at XDC on this effort -- which was aided in part by having some public Windows Driver Display Model 2 (WDDM2) public documentation but then benefited from reverse-engineering while using Windows Subsystem For Linux (WSL2) as well as other WSL components. By reverse engineering enough of the AMD WDDM 2 driver interfaces, Faith has been able to get the open-source RADV Vulkan driver working in conjunction with AMD's proprietary kernel driver on Windows.

Faith summed up the current state as "overall, it's working but lots of stuff doesn't work yet." The Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS) can run for about five minutes along with some Vulkan demos.

As far as why bother getting RADV on Windows, Ekstrand argues that it's beneficial for showcasing Mesa support on Windows, "RADV is better than AMD's Vulkan driver" with more features and better performance, and that game developers can enjoy the open-source nature of the driver to benefit debugging.

Shipping the RADV driver for use on Windows though can be complicated given the reverse-engineered bits, AMD could potentially interfere, and some driver elements are not stable for RADV interfacing with the AMD kernel driver.

At this stage though there isn't any plans by AMD for using RADV on Windows or the like, this was just an experiment by Faith Ekstrand. This open merge request would add the Vulkan WDDM2 device support to upstream Mesa.

Those wishing to learn more about this RADV on Windows experiment can see Faith's presentation embedded above along with the PDF slide deck.