AMD AMDVLK & RADV Drivers Continue To See Improved Radeon GPU Support, Ray Tracing & Mesh Shader Queries Improved

AMD's official "AMDVLK" & the MESA "RADV" drivers continue to see improved Radeon GPU support in Linux with improvements across the board.

AMD's official Vulkan drivers have been facing tough competition from open-source developers on Linux, especially those responsible for MESA's RADV Vulkan drivers who have seen contributions from Valve, Red Hat, and Google. Just recently, the open-source drivers saw support for ray-tracing, which attracted immense interest from the users of Radeon GPUs on the platform and shaped it to be a viable alternative. However, Team Red has stepped into the ring with "partial implementation" of ray-tracing in their drivers. The new GPU highlights include:

- Update Khronos Vulkan headers to 1.3.269 - Enable extension KHR_cooperative_matrix - Support spriv binary without binding decoration - Speed up slow clears with VRS - Enable RT triangle pair compression

Bug Fixes:

- Performance drop observed in X-Plane with resize bar enabled - CTS failure in dEQP-VK.ray_tracing_pipeline.misc.* - CTS failure in dEQP-VK.dynamic_rendering.primary_cmd_buff.basic.partial_binding_depth_stencil - ANGLE test failure in dEQP-GLES31.functional.image_load_store.3d* - Log running out of GPU memory error for gpu profiler SQTT dumping

Phoronix says that KHR_cooperative_matrix support is specifically targeted towards compute shaders within machine learning applications but it is a step that shows that AMD plans on bringing ray-tracing through official drivers soon.

However, based on today's development, it seems like the company is far behind the RADV Vulkan driver, which has already implemented ray-tracing for gaming in titles such as Quake II and DOOM Eternal, that too with a decent performance improvement as well.

If we look at the broader scale, MESA's RADV Vulkan driver is shaping up to be a viable alternative to AMD's Vulkan "AMDVLK" driver, since not only third-party developers are maintaining support for outdated hardware, but they are also bringing in performance improvements with each individual update. The most recent case is the addition of Mesh/Task Shader Queries for RDNA 2 & RDNA 3 GPUs which was also recently added. AMD does have some catching to do at Linux's camp

News Source: Phoronix