It's Easy To Play With The RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver On Ubuntu 16.04

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 12 October 2016 at 10:10 AM EDT. 9 Comments
MESA
Now that the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is part of mainline Mesa, it's increasingly easy to experiment with this unofficial, open-source Vulkan driver on rolling-release distributions and through third-party package archives/repositories.

One of the popular choices for Linux gamers and enthusiasts on Ubuntu, the Padoka PPA, has added support for building the Radeon Vulkan driver with its most recent update over the weekend. The Padoka PPA is now building its Mesa packages with support for the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver to complement the existing Intel Vulkan (ANV) support. The Mesa Git code continues to be built against LLVM 3.0 SVN for the best AMDGPU LLVM back-end support too.

Thus Ubuntu users can simply do apt-add-repository ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/mesa && apt update && apt dist-upgrade. Easy as that!

This package archive is still important for users running the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 16.10 since it's unfortunately stuck to Mesa 12.0 and it's not shipping Vulkan support by default.

Check out my RADV benchmarks from last week plus some NVIDIA Vulkan comparison numbers and I'll be working on some fresh Linux Intel/Radeon/NVIDIA Vulkan benchmarks in the days ahead.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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