Mesa RADV Driver Delivers Conformant Vulkan 1.3 Support For Old AMD GFX6/GFX7 GPUs

While old Radeon GFX6/GFX7 era graphics processors are no longer actively supported by AMD on Windows and haven't been for quite a while, under Linux with the upstream open-source driver stack they remain supported and still enjoying improvements in large part from common code. The most recent fascinating aspect is the old AMD GFX6/GFX7 era GPUs seeing official Vulkan 1.3 support that has been deemed conformant by Khronos.

Thanks to the work of Valve's Linux graphics driver developers and other open-source developers working on the Mesa RADV driver, AMD GFX6 and GFX7 GPUs now have conformant Vulkan 1.3 support. This is for the likes of the Radeon HD 7000 series, Radeon Rx 200/300 series, and other early GCN cards prior to Polaris (GFX8). GFX6 represents CAPE VERDE, PITCAIRN, TAHITI, OLAND, and HAINAN. GFX7 is for BONAIRE, KABINI, MULLINS, KAVERI, and HAWAII GPUs.

Yes, more than decade old GPUs with the AMD Southern Islands GPUs are seeing Vulkan 1.3 conformance on open-source Linux graphics drivers...

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve opened the merge request today for recognizing the Vulkan 1.3 conformance for these aging AMD Radeon GPUs:

"It's the first time RADV is Vulkan conformant on GFX6-7! 🎊

Some chips are missing because we don't have access but most of the GFX6-7 GPUs are covered."

Indeed now on the Khronos.org Vulkan Conformant Products page are these various old AMD GPUs now being recognized for Vulkan 1.3 conformance:

Recognizing this Vulkan 1.3 conformance on these old AMD GPUs should be merged for Mesa 24.3.