AMDVLK 2021.Q4.2 Released With Dynamic Rendering, Other New Extensions

It's been over one month since the release of AMDVLK 2021.Q4.1 as the latest open-source AMD Vulkan driver update, which is off the wagon compared to the prior weekly/bi-weekly release cadence. But today thankfully it's been succeeded by AMDVLK 2021.Q4.2 as the newest driver release.

Since early November when the last AMDVLK open-source driver release occurred, AMDVLK has been seeing new activity to primarily keep up with the new Vulkan API extensions being introduced upstream. Most notable with AMDVLK 2021.Q4.2 is supporting Vulkan's new dynamic rendering support. Mesa's RADV (and Intel's ANV) have already been working on their dynamic rendering support too and NVIDIA has offered VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering in their beta driver since last month.

AMDVLK as a reminder is the official AMD open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems. AMDVLK is derived from AMD's official Vulkan driver sources as used on Windows (and Radeon Software Pro for Linux) but using the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end rather than their proprietary back-end.

In addition to VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering, AMDVLK 2021.Q4.2 also adds support for VK_EXT_index_type_uint8, VK_KHR_format_feature_flags2, VK_EXT_border_color_swizzle, VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart, VK_EXT_pageable_device_local_memory, and VK_EXT_ycbcr_image_arrays. There are also fixes around a Vulkan Conformance Test Suite test case failure and the driver being out of spec for YUV planar image views.

AMDVLK 2021.Q4.2 in source form as well as RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu binaries can be downloaded from GitHub.