RADV+ACO Look To Your Help For Improving The Vulkan Driver & Linux Gaming Performance

RADV is a Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs that is part of the Mesa project and installed on most Linux distros out of the box. Our goal is to deliver a stable and performant driver to Linux gamers, and recently we've made our own shader compiler called ACO. To create the best possible experience, we'd like to take it a step further and ask our users for some testing and feedback.

We are a small team, so we can't play every game from beginning to end. (We'd love to, but then we won't have time for actual driver development.) So, we'd like to ask you, the reader, to help us find any glitch or other bug that you experience with RADV.

What kind of issues are we talking about?

• Did your favorite game work fine on your old PC but crashes with RADV when you go to a specific area? Or even worse, it doesn't crash but the meanest boss in the world has some rendering glitches? Perhaps a flickering shadow makes you feel like you're in a disco?
• Or some stuttering ruins your frag/death ratio?
• Maybe your game appears to run alright, but every now and then your computer completely freezes up? You might be experiencing what we call a GPU hang.

All of these could very well be a driver issue.

How can you report them?

• Head over to the Mesa bug tracker
• Check if your problem has been reported (use search)
• If not, open a new issue, click "Choose template" and select the "Radeon Vulkan" template
• Read the instructions and provide us with all requested information so we can make RADV better

While we're working day after day on improving the driver, we can only fix the issues we know about. Your help really makes a difference: not only does it tell us where our attention is needed most, but also other people benefit who also ran into the issue before but didn't think of reporting it!

FAQ

Q: Tools like Apitrace or RenderDoc are too complicated for me, should I still submit a bug report?

A: Yes! Please do include a screenshot or video that illustrates the problem.

Q: I'm not sure if my problem is in Wine, or DXVK, or RADV, should I still report it?

A: Yes! Your issue will be forwarded to the appropriate place if we conclude that it's not a RADV bug.

Q: Will you actually look at the bug reports, for realz?

A: Yes! We look at all RADV and ACO bug reports as they come in, even if we can't fix them immediately.

Timur Kristóf is a Linux open-source graphics driver developer focusing on the RADV/ACO driver components. As with other RADV/ACO driver developers, his work on the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver has been funded by Valve since 2019.