Radeon News Archives

Down to literally minutes before the Mesa 24.1 codebase was branched for making up this quarter's Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver to then be tested and stabilized with a stable release around mid-May, a number of AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver patches were merged.

AMD's GPUOpen team today released the Radeon GPU Profiler 2.1 software that now sports interoperability with the Radeon GPU Analyzer.

LACT 0.5.4 is out as the open-source and independently developed "Linux AMDGPU Control Application" for this community AMD Linux graphics driver control panel option given the lack of any official Radeon GUI management solution from AMD.

After recently announcing they'd be working to get out Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware documentation and open-source code, AMD said they would be working to open-source more of their software stack and hardware documentation. AMD repeated those calls over the weekend.

This weekend AMD upstreamed a number of new AMDGPU firmware files into the linux-firmware.git repository that serves as a basis for all of the binary firmware/microcode files used by the Linux kernel drivers. This big set of new AMDGPU firmware files is likely for the upcoming RDNA 3.5 / "RDNA3 refresh" / RDNA3+ as it appears will be called updated RDNA3 graphics for upcoming AMD Ryzen SoCs.

The past year there's been an independent open-source driver developer working on "Terakan" as a Vulkan driver for old Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs. These pre-GCN GPUs never received any official Vulkan driver support from AMD but thanks to open-source and a strong desire to pull off such a feat, Vitaliy Kuzmin "Triang3l" has been pursuing this challenge and has been pulling off some basic results. The work so far has been predominantly been carried out with the open-source Linux graphics stack while this weekend the Terakan driver was demonstrated under Microsoft Windows.

Following last week's AMDGPU pull to DRM-Next preparing more next-gen GPU support and other updates for the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window, another batch of feature changes were sent out on Friday ahead of this next kernel cycle.

The much anticipated ROCm 6.1 has now been released! ROCm 6.1 is heavy on new features as well as expanding official operating system coverage to include the latest Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS point release.

AMD on Saturday submitted a big batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics driver feature patches ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle.

The open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa, RADV, has merged its support for handling Vulkan Video accelerated encoding for H.264 and H.265.

Following up on their tweet earlier this week that they would be working to open-source more of their GPU software stack and hardware documentation, AMD now says they will be releasing documentation followed by the source code for their Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) IP block found within Radeon GPUs.

AMD Radeon posted to Twitter/X that "coming soon" they will be open-sourcing additional portions of their software stack as well as putting out more hardware documentation.

After working at ATI/AMD for more than a quarter century and being the open-source graphics driver manager during the early days, John Bridgman has retired.

AMD GPUOpen's Orochi project as a reminder is the effort for allowing dynamic runtime switching between the Radeon HIP and NVIDIA CUDA APIs to allow better cross-GPU portability. Today marks the availability of Orochi 2.0 for enhancing this API to target NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP hardware.

AMD today released its third and last open-source Vulkan driver update of the quarter.

AMD open-source Linux driver patches posted last summer enabled the new "VPE" IP block as a general purpose copy engine for future AMD GPUs. This VPE block might premiere in the upcoming AMD RDNA3.5 refresh (RDNA3+) integrated graphics but in any event AMD is already working on the incrementally improved VPE 1.1 IP with that now being supported by the Mesa 24.1 RadeonSI driver code.

It was just last week that Tiny Corp put their AMD Radeon graphics powered compute boxes "on hold" after being frustrated with the lack of select firmware source code and ultimately hitting various bugs. This wasn't the first time they had put their AMD Radeon graphics plans on-hold or dismissed it outright. With the start of the new week now comes plans to re-introduce an AMD Radeon graphics option for their compute boxes alongside their recently announced NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 compute rigs.

AMD on Thursday published AOMP 19.0-0 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang downstream compiler focused on delivering the latest OpenMP device offloading support for their Radeon GPUs and Instinct accelerators.

AMD used the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2024) this week to announce FSR 3.1, the latest iteration of their FidelityFX Super Resolution tech for game upscaling.

Open-source AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Marek Olšák who is known for his focus on the Gallium3D code has shown no signs of slowing down when it comes to discovering new areas to further enhance the performance and tune the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

While the Linux v6.8 kernel may debut as stable as soon as this weekend, a last-minute pull request of some new AMD graphics IP was submitted today to DRM-Next in aiming to make it for the imminent Linux 6.9 merge window.

Following the news from earlier around George Hotz' Tiny Corp raising new AMD GPU issues and calling for the MES firmware to be open-sourced followed by a positive message from AMD CEO Lisa Su, there's a new update on the matter following a meeting today between Tiny Corp and AMD.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team recently wrapped up experimental support for the RADV Vulkan driver for EXT_shader_object support using Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) on RDNA3/GFX11 graphics processors.

AMD's FreeSync adaptive synchronization technology for displays has come a long way since its 2015 debut and enjoying robust industry adoption. Given the increasing refresh rates of today's TVs and monitors, AMD has rolled out new tier requirements for FreeSync, FreeSync Premium, and FreeSync Premium Pro moving forward.

The AMDGPU Linux driver up until the recent Linux 6.7 kernel release has let you lower the power limit of your graphics card with, well, no limits... This has allowed AMD Radeon Linux users to limit their GPU power draw when desiring for power/efficiency reasons. But since Linux 6.7 they've begun enforcing a lower-power limit set by the respective graphics card BIOS. Users petitioned to have this change reverted but in the name of safety this lower-limit enforcement will stand.

When it comes to the AMD "RDNA3 Refresh" GFX11.5 open-source driver support, to date it's mostly been focused on the GFX 11.5.0 (GFX1150) IP while now being enabled within Mesa 24.1 for the open-source RadeonSI/RADV drivers is support for a GFX 11.5.1 (GFX1151) variant.

With the absence of any official AMD Radeon graphics control panel / settings GUI for Linux enthusiasts/gamers, there are several open-source projects striving to be a viable Radeon GUI control area for Linux gamers/enthusiasts. LACT 0.5.3 was released this weekend as the newest version of this option for AMD Radeon information reporting, GPU overclocking, fan control, power/thermal monitoring, and additional power state configurations.

For those that have experienced glitches while playing back VP9 video content using AMD's Video Core Next (VCN) for GPU acceleration, updated firmware should fix those VP9 decode problems.

Back in 2020 AMD rolled out a video mode optimization for FreeSync on Linux, continued being revised in 2021, FreeSync Video mode then attempted by default in 2022 but then was reverted and then only last year FreeSync Video enabled by default. But now come Linux 6.9, the feature appears to be effectively retired.

Building upon the existing AV1 encode support for RDNA3 GPUs within the Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, AV1 Long-Term Reference "LTR" support is now enabled within Mesa 24.1.

One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed.

It looks like AMD will soon be announcing the ROCm 6.1 update to its open-source GPU compute stack.

It's been almost exactly one month since the release of AMDVLK 2024.Q1.1 and today that's been succeded by AMDVLK 2024.Q1.2 that brings a number of new Vulkan extensions plus some performance tuning.

Following the initial AMDGPU driver updates targeting Linux 6.9 that were submitted to DRM-Next one week ago, another batch of AMDGPU feature updates were sent out today ahead of this next kernel cycle kicking off in March.

Valve's Linux graphics driver team has fixed the Vulkan mesh shader support for those using RDNA3 integrated graphics with Phoenix APUs on the latest Mesa RADV driver code.

AMD on Valentine's Day released an updated Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver stack for enterprise Linux operating systems that targets the Radeon RX 7900 series and Radeon PRO W6800 / W7800 / W7900 graphics cards.

AMD made a Valentine's Day announcement of expanding the graphics cards they are officially supporting with ROCm 6.0 as well as adding ONNX Runtime alongside PyTorch to the AI/ML frameworks they are supporting with their open-source software stack.

In recent weeks there have been a lot of open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver patches flying around for the GFX12 graphics engine, Video Core Next 5, and other new graphics intellectual property (IP) blocks that appear to be for next-generation "RDNA4" Radeon graphics. This week yet more patches have been posted publicly.

Code merged today to mainline LLVM is preparing for the notion of generic targets across the GFX9, GFX10, and GFX11 GPU families. With follow-on work these generic targets are aiming to allow compiling code once and then running across multiple GPUs in the given hardware family.

AMD has begun queuing AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver updates in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.9 merge window kicking off next month.

While AMD ships pre-built ROCm/HIP stacks for the major enterprise Linux distributions, if you are using not one of them or just want to be adventurous and compile your own stack for building HIP programs for running on AMD GPUs, one of the AMD Linux developers has written a how-to guide.

It looks like next-generation RDNA4 graphics will feature a new iteration of the Video Core Next (VCN) for accelerated video encode/decode. VCN 5.0 patches were posted today for the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver.

AMD has merged updated video processing engine "VPElib" code into their Mesa driver with their latest feature work.

AMD engineers on Monday posted a few new patch series for enabling some updated IP (intellectual property) blocks within their open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver. This new IP is presumably part of the ongoing hardware enablement work for their next-generation RDNA4 graphics.

A pull request open for the past eight months for implementing a VOPD scheduler for the Valve-developed ACO "AMD Compiler" back-end has now been merged for Mesa 24.1-devel.

Back in November 2022 AMD announced Brotli-G for GPU-accelerated Brotli compression. Brotli has proven very worthwhile for compressing web assets and other material while AMD's Brotli-G modifies the bitstream format to be more optimal for handling by GPUs rather than just relying on CPU (de)compression. Today Brotli-G 1.0 was finally released.

AMD's GPUOpen crew today released HIP RT 2.2 as the newest version of this ray-tracing library for HIP.

As a follow-up to last week's article around the GCC compiler seeing patches for AMD RDNA3 GPU support so that it's "working for most purposes", that code has now been merged and it's also been confirmed to also bring the RDNA2 support up to a working state.

AMDVLK 2024.Q1.1 has dropped as AMD's first open-source Vulkan API driver release of the new year for Radeon graphics on Linux.

Earlier this month the GCC 14 compiler landed initial support for AMD RDNA3 "GFX11" graphics processors as part of the GNU Compiler Collection's OpenMP device offloading support for GPU compute. That initial support was rather basic but a follow-up patch has the possibility of making the RDNA3 (GFX11) support "working for most purposes" and will hopefully still be merged in time for the GCC 14.1 stable release.