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AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan project is discontinued

154

   AMD is unifying its Linux Vulkan driver strategy and has decided to discontinue the AMDVLK open-source project, throwing our full support behind the RADV driver as the officially supported open-source Vulkan driver for Radeon™ graphics adapters.

Scary title but good news in the end I think.

4 months agoby greatgib

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDVLK-Discontinued

> This is a good but long overdue decision by AMD. RADV has long been more popular with gamers/enthusiasts on Linux than their own official driver. Thanks to Valve, Google, Red Hat, and others, RADV has evolved very nicely.

4 months agoby CBLT

I always think just open sourcing the whole software stack for graphics cards would be an excellent thing for hardware manufacturers, in the end these are free pieces of software and I've certain there would be a big community contributing loads of cool things for free. AMD (say) would also sell a load more hardware as enthusiast features would be added by the community.

Maybe I'm just naive but the downsides of doing this seem absolutely minimal and the upsides quite large.

4 months agoby andy_ppp

I've been running an RX 9070XT since close to release... I've also been running PopOS Cosmic Alpha for the past few months and for better game compatibility been sticking close to the latest mainline kernel.

Just yesterday, I tried getting ROCm working to see of I could use StableDiffusion. Well, in the end 6.16 is currently unsupported and after a few hours of fail, I managed to get the in the box kernel module working again and gave up. It is emphatically nice that many/most games now run through Mesa/Vulkan+Proton without issue... but it would be nice to actually be able to use some of the vaulted AI features in AMD's top current card in the leading edge Linux Kernel release with their platform.

Hopefully sooner than later, this will all "just work" mostly and won't be nearly the exercise in frustration for someone who hasn't been actively in the AI culture. I could create a partition for a prior distro/kernel or revert back, but I probably shouldn't have to, in general I tend to expect leading edge releases to work in the Linux ecosystem, or at least relatively quickly patched up.

4 months agoby tracker1

This is great news for RADV development, I'm hoping someday we can even use ROCm on the open source stack.

4 months agoby potwinkle

Huh I just moved to AMDVLK yesterday, after learning that it has 50% more PP on llama.cpp compared to RADV: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1nabcek/comment...

4 months agoby throwdbaaway

What will AMD do with Windows Vulkan driver, didn't they use amdvlk there? There was some radv on Windows experiment, it would be cool if AMD would use that.

4 months agoby shmerl