AMDVLK Driver Still Being Fixed Up For Steam Play / Proton, Wayland Improvements

The developers working on the official AMD Vulkan Windows/Linux driver have done their weekly push of the latest code to the open-source AMDVLK repositories.

AMDVLK remains close to the upstream, internal state of the official AMD Vulkan driver but with continuing to use its LLVM-based compiler back-end while the Windows/Linux official Vulkan driver builds continue using the internal AMD proprietary compiler back-end. There continues to be work in the direction of switching over the LLVM back-end everywhere, but it doesn't appear to be ready yet.

With this week's code updates to the AMDVLK sources, changes include:

- Previous XGL commits have brought Steam Play / Proton fixes and that has continued this week. Mentioned this week is fixing a game crash affecting at least the game Killer Instinct.

- PAL has Wayland windowing system improvements.

- Swapchain composite alpha support via XGL/PAL changes.

- GPU profiling improvements with being able to now inject shader/pipeline hashes into the thread traces.

- Compiler improvements/optimizations with AMD's LLVM Pipeline Compiler (LLPC) for shader compilation.

- Various other fixes.

Just another week's worth of code committed this morning to the respective repositories. As AMDVLK isn't widely packaged, those wishing to try out this "official" open-source AMD Vulkan driver over RADV can find the build instructions here.

I am currently wrapping up some benchmarks on this week's release of Radeon Software 18.40 with the PRO and Open components compared to various Mesa/AMDGPU versions. The timing should work out well to get a fresh AMDVLK run in there from this morning's code while those numbers should be out already by this afternoon.