AMDVLK 2021.Q3.1 Vulkan Driver Released

AMD has published its first code drop of the quarter for their open-source "AMDVLK" Vulkan driver that is derived from their official driver sources but making use of the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end rather than their proprietary shader compiler.

This AMDVLK 2021.Q3.1 release updates their Vulkan headers against upstream v1.2.182, enables VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_uniform_control_flow, improves multi-pipeline cache file initialization, and has performance tuning for the game Strange Brigade in Steam Play with Navi 10 class graphics. There is also a bug fix around synchronization using pinned memory. The VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_uniform_control_flow extension is nearly a year old now and allows for using the SPIR-V KHR_subgroup_uniform_control_flow extension and guarantee that the uniform subgroup will re-converge in the same manner as invocation groups.

Compared to the packaged Vulkan driver found with their Radeon Software "PRO" Linux driver stack, one major feature not yet found in AMDVLK is support for Vulkan ray-tracing. There's still no word if/when that Vulkan RT support is planned for AMDVLK.

Source downloads of AMDVLK 2021.Q3.1 along with binaries for RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu can be found via GitHub.