Feral Adding AMD_shader_info To RADV Vulkan Driver

As further sign of Feral Interactive continuing to pursue Vulkan for their Linux games, a Feral developer today posted a patch for implementing the brand new AMD_shader_info extension for the RADV Mesa driver.

Alex Smith of Feral posted the patch today wiring in AMD_shader_info. This AMD-developed shader information extension debuted just days ago with the Vulkan 1.0.64 update. This Vulkan extension provides a means of querying information about a compiled shader from the shader disassembly to statistics, but the extension itself places no mandates about what is exposed.

With Feral's RADV VK_AMD_shader_info support, it dumps various shader statistics like the number of spilled registers, code size, waves, scratch memory used, and more. It also is able to provide the disassembly of the shaders.

Alex mentions that this extension support works in conjunction with the latest development code for RenderDoc, a popular Vulkan debugging application, to then easily see the shader disassembly of a capture. This should help a lot for allowing game/app developers like Feral Interactive to be able to quickly analyze the disassembly output when trying to debug a problem.

Great to see all the work continuing to build up around RADV but a shame AMD hasn't yet opened up any more of their own Vulkan driver.