RADV Vulkan Driver Manages Launch-Day Support For AMD Navi 10/12/14 GPUs

Leading up to today's Radeon RX 5700 "Navi" series launch it was looking like there wouldn't be any support within Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for this community-maintained open-source implementation. But the open-source developers at Valve managed to not only deliver Navi 10 support but also Navi 12 and Navi 14 are also supported with this new Mesa 19.2 code.

Various folks at AMD didn't believe the "community" RADV developers at the likes of Valve and Red Hat were provided with samples or documentation in advance, but however it turned out, Valve developer Samuel Pitoiset along with Google developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen managed to land the Navi/GFX10 enablement code just minutes ago into Mesa 19.2 Git.

The code is just about one thousand lines on top of the existing RADV GFX9 support. Interestingly, some 600 lines of that code is just for bringing up the NGG (Next Generation Geometry) support for vertex shaders. So overall at least from the Vulkan driver side it wasn't much new code for driving Navi, granted, it also leverages the Navi support within the AMDGPU kernel driver and LLVM shader compiler.

It's not clear at this stage how well optimized RADV is for the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT if it will be like RadeonSI where a lot of additional optimizations are pending. At least though this means Mesa 19.2 due out around the end of August / early September will have both open-source OpenGL and Vulkan support for these new GPUs.

Also somewhat entertaining is that this RADV Navi support has beat out AMD's official Vulkan Linux driver "AMDVLK" for Navi support as that is still pending and expected in the days ahead once finishing up its internal/legal reviews.

I'll have up some new RadeonSI+RADV benchmarks on the RX 5700 and RX 5700XT to allow for any imminent optimizations/fixes to land.