Don't Bother Trying AMDVLK Vulkan With Rise of the Tomb Raider Right Now

Following yesterday's 20-way graphics card comparison for Rise of the Tomb Raider that debuted yesterday on Linux and is exclusively powered by Vulkan, my next benchmarking objective was trying out the official AMD Vulkan driver, AMDVLK, to see how it would work given the successes of RADV on launch-day for this latest Feral Interactive game port.

Using AMDVLK as of this week built from Git source, in fact the same build as of the AMDVLK vs. RADV Vulkan driver benchmarks from earlier this week, I set out to try Rise of the Tomb Raider on this driver with an RX 580, R9 Fury, and RX Vega 64 graphics cards on this same system.

Sadly that effort was quickly thwarted. Sometimes I would get a run to pass with low quality settings at 1080p, but within a few runs, the driver would hang. The AMDVLK hanging would almost always occur within the "Geothermal Valley" scene of the Rise of the Tomb Raider run.

I spent the evening mucking around with it, but long story short, AMDVLK as of right now doesn't seem to work properly with Rise of the Tomb Raider with the Polaris, Fiji, and Vega hardware I tested. But at least there's hope it could be fixed up relatively soon since the rendering was correct, etc, it would just end up hanging. Once that's no longer the case, I'm looking forward to an interesting Vulkan driver benchmark battle.