Valve's Linux Graphics Engineers Begin Prepping RADV Driver For AMD RDNA4 "GFX12"

The open-source Mesa driver developers employed by Valve for working on the Linux graphics stack have begun preparing the RADV Vulkan driver and the ACO compiler back-end for the upcoming "GFX12" graphics IP for next-generation RDNA4.

The open-source AMD Linux graphics stack has been abuzz the past few months with GFX12 preparations for this next-gen graphics IP succeeding GFX11 used by RDNA3 class hardware. Just a few days ago GFX12 was merged for the RadeonSI driver providing the AMD OpenGL driver support on the Linux desktop.

With the Mesa RADV driver continuing to be the unofficial AMD Vulkan driver compared to the official open-source AMDVLK Linux driver or their in-house driver code, it's Valve engineers taking on the RADV driver support just as they've done for prior generations.

Landing this week was GFX12 assembler support within the ACO compiler back-end by Rhys Perry. Overnight Rhys opened up another merge request for GFX12 wait counters in ACO.

Yesterday well known RADV developer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve opened this merge request with small preliminary changes to be done before adding the GFX12 support:

"A bunch of context register moved on GFX12 and this MR contains small changes to simplify adding GFX12 support."

We'll see when the actual support lands but at this rate it's looking possible the RDNA4 / GFX12 support may be ready for introduction in next quarter's Mesa 24.2 release. The expectation is AMD will introduce RDNA4 graphics cards later in 2024. Over on the kernel side, the new AMD IP blocks continue to be enabled within the AMDGPU and AMDKFD drivers.