sparseBinding Lands For Radeon RADV Vulkan Driver

The open-source community-based "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver has now enabled the sparseBinding feature.

The sparse memory binding device feature indicates "whether resource memory can be managed at opaque sparse block level instead of at the object level. If this feature is not enabled, resource memory must be bound only on a per-object basis using the vkBindBufferMemory and vkBindImageMemory commands...The basic sparseBinding feature allows the resource to reserve its own device virtual address range at resource creation time rather than relying on a bind operation to set this," as explained in the Vulkan specification.

Bas Nieuwenhuizen landed the sparse memory binding feature overnight in RADV while his patches for this feature have been floating around for about two months.

Among the Vulkan device features not yet supported by RADV in Mesa Git are now tessellation shaders, sample rate shading, ETC2 and ASTC LDR texture compression, pipeline statistics query, storage image multi-sample, int64, int16, variable multi-sample rate, and inherited queries. Will be interesting to see if RADV finishes off these features before AMD open-sources any of their Vulkan driver code.