RADV Vulkan Driver Finally Picking Up 16-Bit Integer Support In Shaders

Samuel Pitoiset working for Valve's Linux GPU driver team has now sent out shaderInt16 support for the RADV driver.

Following 9 patches hitting the Mesa mailing list on Friday, Samuel wired up shaderInt16 support for this Mesa-based open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. The shaderInt16 capability indicates whether 16-bit signed/unsigned integers are supported in the shader code for the Vulkan driver.

Samuel doesn't appear to be entirely confident in this RADV shaderInt16 support as he isn't sure it's all wired up, but is enough to get relevant demos and conformance test suite cases passing.

While shaderInt16 has somewhat limited use currently for Linux gamers, it's worth noting that this has been one of the few original Vulkan physical device features not supported by RADV. This just leaves ASTC LDR texture compression (not too relevant either for desktop GPUs with current hardware) and storage image multi-sample as being the features not implemented of the options enabled for GetPhysicalDeviceFeatures.