AMD’s official “AMDVLK” & the MESA “RADV” drivers continue to see improved Radeon GPU support in Linux with improvements across the board.
AMD Brings Improved Ray Tracing Support To Radeon GPUs With Vulkan Drivers In Linux, MESA RADV Brings Mesh Shader Queries Support
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 compressionBug 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a viable alternative to AMD’s Vulkan “AMDVLK” driver, since not only third-party developers are maintaining support for outdated hardware, but they are also bringing in performance improvements with each individual update.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
