AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 Driver Re-Released

Back in April we wrote about the AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 Vulkan driver update for Radeon Linux systems while as some driver deja vu this driver version with the same changes have been re-released.

As noted last month, with the AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 driver release the headers have been re-based against Vulkan API 1.2.174 and there are two listed new features. AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 adds support to dynamic enable of color writes and partial nested command buffer support in the GPU debug layer.

Bugs fixed in this open-source AMD Vulkan driver release are dealing with out-of-memory errors when the driver is loaded but no AMD GPU is installed, DCC color compression was being incorrectly enabled for certain formats, and some applications were running the LLVMpipe driver by default when enabling the AMD switchable graphics layer.

The sources of this AMDVLK driver update along with binaries for Ubuntu and RHEL/CentOS systems can be found via GitHub. As for why AMDVLK 2021.Q2.2 was re-released, remains to be seen. The prior 2021.Q2.2 release from last month was pulled and this new build issued today with the same changes. Hopefully AMDVLK 2021.Q2.3 will be out soon while still no word on Vulkan ray-tracing coming to this open-source AMDVLK driver.