Valve's Linux Graphics Engineers Begin Prepping RADV Driver For AMD RDNA4 "GFX12"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve's Linux Graphics Engineers Begin Prepping RADV Driver For AMD RDNA4 "GFX12"

The open-source Mesa driver developers employed by Valve for working on the Linux graphics stack have begun preparing the RADV Vulkan driver and the ACO compiler back-end for the upcoming "GFX12" graphics IP for next-generation RDNA4...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-RADV-GFX12-Mesa-Prep

[yoshi314]

am i the only person who finds it odd that AMD drops hardware and it is up to 3rd party (Valve) to write vulkan drivers for it?

[mbriar]

am i the only person who finds it odd that AMD drops hardware and it is up to 3rd party (Valve) to write vulkan drivers for it?

AMD writes their own vulkan driver as well (AMDVLK), it's just that nobody uses it because it's mostly inferior for proton gaming.

[yoshi314]

well, that's exactly what i was going for. seems like they don't care about end-users that much.

[skeevy420]

am i the only person who finds it odd that AMD drops hardware and it is up to 3rd party (Valve) to write vulkan drivers for it?

No. It only makes sense if you know the context. Historically, it has kind of always been that way with AMD/ATi on Linux. Back in the day it was Catalyst against the open stack and that transitioned into an open stack with competing standards implementations. While AMD is a great win for FOSS, it's because AMD's software and drivers have traditionally been so bad that FOSS had and still has to rescue it. It'll eventually turn into fine wine, but it can start off tasting like red wine vinegar.

Catalyst was kind of bad, especially for bleeding edge users, so we ended up using radeonsi, r600, the radeon module, etc. Now that they're open source, not everything is developed out in the open like AMDVLK. It's open, but it gets code dumps every couple of months and code dumps are hard for 3rd parties to collaborate on. That's why RADV was born. There was a time a few years ago when they'd trade blows, but RADV is the superior Vulkan these days.

It's rather ironic that the folks who are behind Mantle and Vulkan have the shitty Vulkan driver. It's then funny as hell that the video game store was like, "Fuck me, our users are having a bad time. Let's do something about that. Let's spend $400K to make $400M" so we now have a better Vulkan driver.

EDIT: I didn't see this post until I deadheaded some begonias....

well, that's exactly what i was going for. seems like they don't care about end-users that much.

No, they don't. That's why they drop support from software when they drop new hardware for us to buy.

AMD is very developer and corporate friendly. While that's nice for FOSS, it isn't necessarily nice for end-users who just want to use the things they buy. Unlike NVIDIA, AMD doesn't make an all-in-one driver with all their latest updates for any distribution that meets the minimum requirements to use. With AMD you have to run bleeding edge to get regular graphics updates or you can run LTS or EL with a Pro driver. There is no middle-ground. There is no universal driver like NVIDIA offers. That's the most user unfriendly thing AMD does on Linux. Intel is guilty of that, too.

[shmerl]

am i the only person who finds it odd that AMD drops hardware and it is up to 3rd party (Valve) to write vulkan drivers for it?

It is odd that it's still the case (regardless of the excuse that they worked on amdvlk first). AMD should do what Intel is doing with anv and support radv directly, even if their Windows Vulkan driver would need to be separate.

[Venemo]

Now that they're open source, not everything is developed out in the open like AMDVLK. It's open, but it gets code dumps every couple of months and code dumps are hard for 3rd parties to collaborate on. That's why RADV was born.

No, it isn't. Bas and Dave started working on RADV before AMDVLK existed or was made public.

[kurkosdr]

am i the only person who finds it odd that AMD drops hardware and it is up to 3rd party (Valve) to write vulkan drivers for it?

I can't tell whether you are the only person, but it's the concept of having an OS tailor-made for the hardware it ships with.

I mean, do you really think Qualcomm writes Windows drivers for Adreno out of the goodness of their hearts? Or to satisfy the 1% of Adreno sales that their Snapdragon X SoCs represent? Of course not. Microsoft is paying Qualcomm to do it, Qualcomm has no obligation to care otherwise. Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple wrote the drivers for the AMD GPUs used in the Intel-based Mac Pro line or paid AMD to do it, because AMD's main market was and is Windows by a huge margin, and they barely have a software team to write good drivers for Windows.

You see, whining that a GPU vendor won't properly support a given OS on random forums is not a valid product development strategy. Also, shipping Desktop Linux on repurposed Windows machines and relying on whatever half-baked drivers already exist out there (ala System76) is not a valid product development strategy.

[Panix]

No. It only makes sense if you know the context. Historically, it has kind of always been that way with AMD/ATi on Linux. Back in the day it was Catalyst against the open stack and that transitioned into an open stack with competing standards implementations. While AMD is a great win for FOSS, it's because AMD's software and drivers have traditionally been so bad that FOSS had and still has to rescue it. It'll eventually turn into fine wine, but it can start off tasting like red wine vinegar.

Catalyst was kind of bad, especially for bleeding edge users, so we ended up using radeonsi, r600, the radeon module, etc. Now that they're open source, not everything is developed out in the open like AMDVLK. It's open, but it gets code dumps every couple of months and code dumps are hard for 3rd parties to collaborate on. That's why RADV was born. There was a time a few years ago when they'd trade blows, but RADV is the superior Vulkan these days.

It's rather ironic that the folks who are behind Mantle and Vulkan have the shitty Vulkan driver. It's then funny as hell that the video game store was like, "Fuck me, our users are having a bad time. Let's do something about that. Let's spend $400K to make $400M" so we now have a better Vulkan driver.

EDIT: I didn't see this post until I deadheaded some begonias....



No, they don't. That's why they drop support from software when they drop new hardware for us to buy.

AMD is very developer and corporate friendly. While that's nice for FOSS, it isn't necessarily nice for end-users who just want to use the things they buy. Unlike NVIDIA, AMD doesn't make an all-in-one driver with all their latest updates for any distribution that meets the minimum requirements to use. With AMD you have to run bleeding edge to get regular graphics updates or you can run LTS or EL with a Pro driver. There is no middle-ground. There is no universal driver like NVIDIA offers. That's the most user unfriendly thing AMD does on Linux. Intel is guilty of that, too.

AMD doesn't have an 'all-in-one to benefit end users - it's' to be different - the regard for the end-user is the same meaning nothing or little regard. But, yeah, promoting this 'FOSS' benefit fools a bunch of Linux users but that's not a big percentage of the end users. At the end of the day, their priority is Windows gamers and perhaps, to some increasing extent nowadays, AI.

[skeevy420]

No, it isn't. Bas and Dave started working on RADV before AMDVLK existed or was made public.

My apologies. It's been long enough that I forgot all the details of the timeline.

AMD doesn't have an 'all-in-one to benefit end users - it's' to be different - the regard for the end-user is the same meaning nothing or little regard. But, yeah, promoting this 'FOSS' benefit fools a bunch of Linux users but that's not a big percentage of the end users. At the end of the day, their priority is Windows gamers and perhaps, to some increasing extent nowadays, AI.

To be fair, it seems like we might actually get some sort of all-in-one solution. All the tinycorp complaints seem to be being addressed.

Even on Windows their priority is users with newer GPUs; gaming and GPGPU. The way things are going I wouldn't be too surprised if AMD depreciated my RDNA2 in another year or two.