AMDVLK 2018.4.2 Open-Source Vulkan Driver Brings Sparse Support, Degenerate Triangles

It appears AMD is stepping up their game around the open-source AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver with moving to tagged releases and better release notes.

One year after they began pushing out the sources to AMDVLK, which is based upon their internal Linux/Windows Vulkan driver code, they did their first tagged release last week in the form of AMDVLK 2018.4.1. Out today is AMDVLK 2018.4.2.

AMDVLK 2018.4.2 marks their latest public code push, which they have been doing roughly on a weekly basis since they began with these code drops last December. The AMDVLK 2018.4.2 release adds sparse memory support by default, supports the new VK_AMD_memory_overallocation_behavior extension, enables degenerate triangles for conservative rasterizations, a new setting to limit the compute units enabled to compute shaders, support to dump debug stack traces, and a variety of fixes.

A complete overview of this week's Vulkan driver changes can be found via the Git tagged release. Besides the sources being tagged for this latest weekly code drop, there is also an AMDVLK Ubuntu 18.04 package too for easy deployment should you be riding the Ubuntu LTS.