RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver Submitted For Review To Be Included In Mesa

It's looking more and more like this month's Mesa 12.1/13.0 release will have the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver included!

Last week was Mesa release manager Emil Velikov mentioning his hope to see RADV in Mesa's next release, due out at the end of October. There's much interest in seeing this driver integrated into Mesa as initial Radeon Vulkan support even though this is the "community" driver with AMD having yet to open up their Vulkan driver code.

In aiming to get the Radeon Vulkan RADV driver integrated into the Mesa Git code-base ahead of the 12.1/13.0 branching, David Airlie today published his mailing list post for initial submission of this driver.

Airlie reaffirmed this driver isn't yet fully Vulkan 1.0 compliant but is enough to run The Talos Principle / Dota 2 / vkQuake. "This driver is in no way to be considered conformant or called such. It has NOT passed the vulkan conformance suite or ever been submitted to Khronos. It prints a big warning on startup to this effect. In saying that, it runs quite well with Dota 2, Talos Principle and vkQuake in our testing so far."

Aside from reaching Vulkan compliance, still to be accomplished are various hardware speed-ups, missing features like spilling, and finishing up geometry / tessellation shader functionality. There's also the potential for more code sharing with the RadeonSI driver. You can read Airlie's message for review of this RADV driver code via this mailing list post.

For those not following our many RADV articles and tests to this point, this Vulkan driver will only work with the AMDGPU kernel driver -- GCN 1.2 officially while GCN 1.0/1.1 work is experimental, before any forum-goers ask about hardware support or if this Vulkan driver can work on an old Radeon GPU. Fresh RADV benchmarks will be coming versus AMDGPU-PRO and OpenGL renderer results in the next few days.