Terakan Driver Continues Working To Bring Vulkan To The Radeon HD 6000 Series

While AMD officially supports a much narrower range of more recent Radeon hardware with their official graphics drivers for Windows (and Linux - as it pertains to their Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver and AMDVLK official Vulkan driver), thanks to the open-source community around AMD's open-source driver code there are always nifty things that come about... As I wrote about earlier this year, an independent developer has been striving to bring Vulkan to the Radeon HD 6000 series. Yes, the 13 year old "Northern Islands" graphics processors.

Before getting too excited over prospects of running Vulkan on your old TeraScale 2/3 graphics cards, it's been a slow process for this Vulkan driver dubbed "Terakan". Over the summer lead developer "Triang3l" was working on the very basic pieces for this Mesa-based Vulkan driver. Fast forward several months, he's making more visible progress.

As of last week he's now been able to render his first triangles being drawn with a real Vulkan pipeline on this driver. This is making use of the shader compiler in use by the Radeon R600g Gallium3D driver. The developer tweeted some of the first triangles on this Vulkan driver running on Radeon HD 6000 series hardware:

It's quite an achievement for running Vulkan on GPUs released long before the industry standard API was conceived. And it's great for showing the possibilities and ingenuity of the open-source community. It will be interesting to see how far this Terakan driver evolves and how many Vulkan extensions end up being capable to realistically support on the Radeon HD 6000 series hardware. Don't expect modern Vulkan games (or rather, Steam Play games using Direct3D and running on Vulkan via DXVK/VKD3D-Proton for Vulkan) to magically run well on these old Radeon GPUs, but this is an interesting technical achievement nevertheless and may be useful for some lighter games or as more desktops/compositors explore Vulkan API use, among other possible uses.