AMDVLK 2019.Q3.2 Released With Navi 10 Support

Just over one week after the Radeon RX 5700/5700XT "Navi" graphics cards began shipping, the AMDVLK open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver support is now available for these first RDNA offerings.

AMDVLK is the official open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver and is based on the same sources as the Windows/Linux Radeon Software Vulkan driver. The open-source AMDVLK, however, uses their LLVM-based shader compiler rather than AMD's long-standing proprietary shader compiler. AMDVLK is an alternative to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver maintained by the "community" (principally, Red Hat, Google, and Valve) that did see launch-day support last week for Navi.

AMDVLK's open-source Navi support was held up by AMD's internal/review processes but has now made it out there with this latest weekly code push to the AMDVLK GitHub repository.

AMDVLK 2019.Q3.2 is the new release as of today with the Navi 10 enablement as well as enabling shader writes for alphatToCoverageEnable when the attachment is unused and changing the reported driver UUID to "AMD-LINUX-DRV".

This new AMDVLK driver is available from GitHub. For Navi support it must be paired with the Linux 5.3+ kernel.

It looks like this week with RADV Navi changes also settling down I'll be running some Vulkan benchmarks on the 5700/5700XT.