Valve Is Working With AMD On VR Support In AMDGPU-PRO

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve Is Working With AMD On VR Support In AMDGPU-PRO

Right now if you want to make use of SteamVR on Linux with Radeon GPUs, you need to use a patched version of the RADV driver. The RADV Vulkan bits for SteamVR are still working their way to mainline while the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver doesn't yet support SteamVR's required Vulkan extensions, but the support is being worked on...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-PRO-VR-Linux

[humbug]

Good to hear. It is after all easily the fastest vulkan driver available for AMD GPUs.

because it's not open source (yet) many in the linux community will not acknowledge the good performance tuning work AMD devs have put into this vulkan driver.

I wish it supported modern kernels and distros though.

[dungeon]

I expected to see some new special amdgpu-pro build for SteamOS 2.118 they pushed 2 days ago, but probably it is only internal work still

Maybe for SteamOS 3 it would be.

[blacknova]

Interesting, why not in radeonsi mesa's driver?

[Michael]

Interesting, why not in radeonsi mesa's driver?

SteamVR on Linux only uses Vulkan. RadeonSI is OpenGL driver.

[dungeon]

Maybe people remember rethoric before Vulkan get name that was OpenGL Next actually So might be people think as RadeonSI also have Next there also

Vulkan is entire separate API, that might not be clear to somebody as people live in a world of bloat and nature of bloated world is not at all easy to understand

[haagch]

I wish it supported modern kernels and distros though.

Seems to work fine on mainline 4.12-rc5 + drm-next-4.13-wip.

Unfortunately you have to use their still closed source libdrm fork.

This PKGBUILD for archlinux is doing it in a funny way https://github.com/libcg/archlinux-a...ster/PKGBUILD: They rename libdrm_amdgpu.so.1.0.0 to libdrm_amdgpo.so.1.0.0 and then binary patch amdgpu-pro's opencl and vulkan drivers to use the new name, so you can have both in /usr/lib/ and everything works as expected.

[humbug]

I expected to see some new special amdgpu-pro build for SteamOS 2.118 they pushed 2 days ago, but probably it is only internal work still

Maybe for SteamOS 3 it would be.

Valve just switched away from amdgpu-pro on steamOS, they now use Mesa drivers for AMD. They've invested a lot into Mesa, don't expect them to go back now that they have moved.

They still want things to work properly on the proprietary driver though, as this article makes clear. Valve knows that this Vulkan driver will be open sourced and come back to them in some form... For now though as far as AMD gamers are concerned Vulkan performance is the only reason to use the proprietary driver over Mesa.

[agd5f]

Seems to work fine on mainline 4.12-rc5 + drm-next-4.13-wip.

Unfortunately you have to use their still closed source libdrm fork.

This PKGBUILD for archlinux is doing it in a funny way https://github.com/libcg/archlinux-a...ster/PKGBUILD: They rename libdrm_amdgpu.so.1.0.0 to libdrm_amdgpo.so.1.0.0 and then binary patch amdgpu-pro's opencl and vulkan drivers to use the new name, so you can have both in /usr/lib/ and everything works as expected.

The source the hybrid kernel and libdrm are available:

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/drm/log/?h=amd-mainline-hybrid-master20170517

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/linux/log/?h=amd-mainline-hybrid-4.11

[dungeon]

Valve just switched away from amdgpu-pro on steamOS, they now use Mesa drivers for AMD. They've invested a lot into Mesa, don't expect them to go back now that they have moved.

They still want things to work properly on the proprietary driver though, as this article makes clear. Valve knows that this Vulkan driver will be open sourced and come back to them in some form... For now though as far as AMD gamers are concerned Vulkan performance is the only reason to use the proprietary driver over Mesa.

SteamOS just "switched drivers" on that point when they upgrade kernel to 4.11, that does not mean they "switched away" from AMDGPU-PRO just that PRO does not build on that new kernel

If all 3 GPU vendors are supportable under same new kernel, they would keep PRO believe me Thing is as always on Linux, one kernel hardly works the best on all hardware, nature of Linux you know And then even distros are marked crazy, but not a drivers for some reason