RADV Vulkan Driver Lands Transform Feedback For Mesa 18.3

As a big win for Radeon Linux gamers using the RADV and enjoying Steam Play (Proton) or Wine games and making use of the DXVK library, this open-source AMD Vulkan driver has merged support for transform feedback!

With the latest Mesa 18.3-devel code as of today, the RADV driver now exposes VK_EXT_transform_feedback. This transform feedback extension was introduced recently to Vulkan (v1.1.88) as an unofficial option for wrappers like DXVK and VKD3D to provide Direct3D Stream-Out functionality on top of Vulkan. This transform feedback is similar to the OpenGL functionality so may also help out GL-over-Vulkan efforts too. The NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver for Linux has already supported this extension and RADV patches had been available since the extension debuted while today it was merged to Mesa master.

The timing is important as now this functionality will be in Mesa 18.3. Mesa 18.3 is going into its feature freeze later this week with hopes of releasing as stable by the end of November.

So when that's out, you'll be able to pair Steam Play / DXVK with the updated RADV driver and experience more Windows games running nicely on Linux.

Kudos to Valve's Samuel Pitoiset and others involved in getting this VK_EXT_transform_feedback support landed across the commits this morning. The Intel ANV Vulkan driver hasn't yet merged its transform feedback support; at last check they were waiting until better test suite coverage.