RADV Vulkan Driver Merges Device Generated Commands Support

Thanks to Valve's Linux graphics team, VK_EXT_device_generated_commands is now supported by the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver with the upcoming Mesa 24.3 release.

Prominent RADV developer Samuel Pitoiset at Valve has landed support for VK_EXT_device_generated_commands, the multi-vendor device generated commands "DGC" implementation. Last month with Vulkan 1.3.296 the VK_EXT_device_generated_commands extension was introduced to succeed NVIDIA's vendor-prefixed DGC extension. The device generated commands extension allows for the GPU device to generate a number of commands for command buffers. VK_EXT_device_generated_commands is a very big and important addition to the Vulkan API: Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz has argued that DGC is the biggest addition to Vulkan since ray-tracing.

The RADV driver is exposing the VK_EXT_device_generated_commands extension for AMD GFX8 (Polaris) GPUs and newer. After the code was under review the past month, this merge request finally made it into Mesa 24.3-devel on Monday for providing this device generated commands support to RADV.

The Intel ANV merge request for VK_EXT_device_generated_commands remains open and under development/testing.