AMDVLK 2019.Q4.2 Brings Several More Extensions, Game Tuning

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMDVLK 2019.Q4.2 Brings Several More Extensions, Game Tuning

AMDVLK 2019.Q4.2 is out today as AMD's second open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver update for the fourth quarter...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDVLK-2019.Q4.2-Released

[loganj]

how many drivers are for amd cards. lets say vega and navi
what you need to have installed in order to play a game? (any kind of game)

[skeevy420]

how many drivers are for amd cards. lets say vega and navi
what you need to have installed in order to play a game? (any kind of game)

Omitting the older stuff, CIK and earlier GPUs, the bare minimum is just Mesa with their RADV driver and, dammit, what ever the OpenGL driver is called...I forgot

RADV then has the ACO and LLVM backends. When ACO works, it's the better of the two because LLVM is the older, causes lag while shaders are being generated, driver.

AMDVLK just adds another Vulkan driver we can try, LLVM backend.

Oh, and there's also AMDVLK-Pro from the AMDGPU-Pro package, also LLVM backend. It can be used separately from the Pro package. It renders slightly differently than AMDVLK and is yet another thing to try. (the AUR package should be enough instructions for a Linux geek to see what's necessary to use it anywhere else)

For the most part, all work equally well. Some games AMDVLK does better; some games RADV does better; some games AMDVLK-Pro does better. Most people won't know the difference or even care. It is nice to have all three because, a lot of times with new release games, one of those Vulkan drivers will outshine the others...usually until the next point release of the "not as shiny" drivers where it goes back to "most people won't know the difference or even care".

AMDGPU-Pro, for the most part, isn't necessary for playing games.

I say "for the most part" in regards to AMDGPU-Pro because it does sometimes have newer hardware supported before Mesa and the Linux kernel. That kind of assumes the person is more of an end-user and doesn't know about or is unable to build various things such as AMD-Staging kernels & Mesa/llvm from git since that same hardware is usually supported from the git-based sources if AMDGPU-Pro has it.


Updated based on Brisse's post below

So we have something like 7 drivers for games:

OpenGL:

1. Mesa RadeonSI
2. AMDGPU-Pro

Vulkan:

1. Mesa RADV-LLVM
2. Mesa RADV-ACO
3. AMDVLK (standalone)
4. AMDVLK-Pro (used separately from the rest of AMDGPU-Pro)
5. AMDGPU-Pro

[Brisse]

how many drivers are for amd cards. lets say vega and navi
what you need to have installed in order to play a game? (any kind of game)

For Vulkan there is:
RADV (part of Mesa, developed mostly by third parties, pre-packaged for most distributions)
AMDVLK (standalone free open source driver from AMD)
AMDGPU-PRO (hybrid proprietary driver from AMD)

And OpenGL:
RadeonSI (part of Mesa and installed right out of the box on most distributions)
AMDGPU-PRO (hybrid proprietary driver from AMD)

If you are not sure which to use, just stick to the Mesa drivers, RadeonSI and RADV. The former is usually installed by default in most distributions, the latter may have to be installed manually by running for example 'sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers' on Debian based distributions.

There are also some older drivers and compute drivers which I won't bother mentioning unless you specifically want to know more about them.

[skeevy420]

For Vulkan there is:
RADV (part of Mesa, developed mostly by third parties, pre-packaged for most distributions)
AMDVLK (standalone free open source driver from AMD)
AMDGPU-PRO (hybrid proprietary driver from AMD)

And OpenGL:
RadeonSI (part of Mesa and installed right out of the box on most distributions)
AMDGPU-PRO (hybrid proprietary driver from AMD)

If you are not sure which to use, just stick to the Mesa drivers, RadeonSI and RADV. The former is usually installed by default in most distributions, the latter may have to be installed manually by running for example 'sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers' on Debian based distributions.

There are also some older drivers and compute drivers which I won't bother mentioning unless you specifically want to know more about them.

So 7....damn . I forgot about Pro OpenGL since I've never used it

[loganj]

so you need so many drivers to play 1 game? i hope you don't have to switch between them if one game use vulkan and another use opengl
i wonder why people says bad things about nvidia with only 1 driver that rules them all.
thats just strange to me.

[skeevy420]

so you need so many drivers to play 1 game? i hope you don't have to switch between them if one game use vulkan and another use opengl
i wonder why people says bad things about nvidia with only 1 driver that rules them all.
thats just strange to me.

By default, most distributions anyways, RADV-LLVM and RadeonSI (OpenGL) are used. If an AMDGPU-Pro package is installed and used, it will take prescience.

To change from RADV or AMDGPU-Pro from there, one has to manually set the driver before launching the game via env variable or set the env variable globally upon boot if they don't want to use RADV/AMDGPU-Pro.

RADV's ACO also has to be enabled in the same matter via env variable (LLVM is default currently).

This is a little snippet from my /etc/environment with all the values for Vulkan and the ACO/LLVM env variable

## Vulkan -- only enable one
# AMDVLK (Manjaro package)
#VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/amd_icd64.json

# AMDVLK-Pro (TkG package)
#VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/opt/amdgpu-pro/etc/vulkan/icd.d/amd_icd64.json

# AMDVLK-Pro (AUR package)
#VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/amd_pro_icd64.json

# RADV
VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/radeon_icd.x86_64.json

# ACO/LLVM Switch
RADV_PERFTEST=llvm

[JPFSanders]

AMDVLK... AMD fixing stuff for the RPCS3 emulator???

But, but, muh AMD conspiracy in which AMD doesn't want to help emulators...

/SARC OFF

[jrch2k8]

so you need so many drivers to play 1 game? i hope you don't have to switch between them if one game use vulkan and another use opengl
i wonder why people says bad things about nvidia with only 1 driver that rules them all.
thats just strange to me.

Basically, this is what happened:

1. AMDVLK is the official AMD opensource vulkan driver but it took way too long to release and by that time the community created RADV and was already in excellent shape.
2. RADV is the community Vulkan Driver started before AMD have any support for Vulkan on Linux.
3. AMDGPU-PRO basically AMD closed(ISH) driver for Linux and is basically meant for Enterprise and Enterprise Distros like RedHat(it can work on other distros of course)

What should you use?:

1. RADV is the best of the lot and is the official driver that Valve and Co uses for testing, also the official driver used by DXVK/D9VK devs on AMD. Also usually receive bug fixes very very fast from a huge miriad of developers and is integrated on Mesa and available OOB. If you want the faster compiler for games just export RADV_PERFTEST=aco and that is all(you need Mesa 19.2+)
2. AMDVLK it goes from totally broken to somewhat useful in some games/GPU depending the release version, Only developed by AMD developers, very broken for DXVK/D9VK in a huge list of games, not tested by anyone by default, huge delays on bug fixes BUT with some GPUs it may help until RADV catch up but i usually don't find it worth it because is very annoying to switch back and forth and usually RADV catches up very fast.
3. AMDGPU-PRO honestly haven't bothered too much with it and last time i tried was extremely broken for 100% of my DXVK/D9VK games and my Native Vulkan games have all kind of issues as well but could have changed at some point. To be fair this driver is meant for Enterprise operation not gaming.

Rule of thumb for an easy live:

USE MESA's RADV/RADEONSI, that's it. for 99.99% of the case is the best driver hands down.

[Brisse]

so you need so many drivers to play 1 game? i hope you don't have to switch between them if one game use vulkan and another use opengl
i wonder why people says bad things about nvidia with only 1 driver that rules them all.
thats just strange to me.

No, you only need one for each API, so one for OpenGL and one for Vulkan. If you want to keep it as simple as possible, just stick to the Mesa drivers provided by your distribution. No need to install anything else. It's even simpler than Nvidia really, because it's provided by the various distributions, installed right out of the box.