All articles tagged with #radv
Mesa developer Marek Olšák, now with Valve, merged 19 patches to optimize RADV and the ACO shader compiler, including removing unused depth/stencil fragment outputs, depth/stencil/sample mask elimination, and alpha-to-coverage fixes for GFX11/RDNA3; the changes aim to improve pixel shader throughput and should benefit DXVK and VKD3D, with the work landing in Mesa 26.3 for a Q4 stable release.
Mesa 26.0 introduces a dedicated transfer-only queue support in the RADV Vulkan driver using the SDMA engine, benefiting resource streaming and memory management on GFX9 and newer AMD GPUs, with activation via an environment variable, expected to improve Vulkan app performance.
Mesa 26.0 has merged a significant ray-tracing improvement for the RADV Vulkan driver, enhancing Unreal Engine 5 performance on Linux, with stable release expected in February alongside other driver updates.
AMD's RDNA4 GPUs now support new performance counters in RADV, integrated with Radeon GPU Profiler 2.6, aiding developers and driver writers in better profiling and utilization of Radeon hardware on Linux.
A significant update for older AMD GCN GPUs has been merged into Mesa 26.0, addressing VM faults caused by hardware bugs in GFX6 and GFX7 GPUs, improving stability and performance for Linux users and gamers.
AMD has discontinued its AMDVLK driver in favor of focusing solely on the RADV driver for Vulkan on Linux, with recent benchmarks showing significant improvements in RADV's performance, especially in Vulkan ray-tracing, making it a strong choice for Linux gamers and workstation users.
The Mesa 260 RADV driver now supports new performance counters, including LDS conflicts, memory bytes, and ray-tracing metrics, aiding game developers in GPU performance profiling and optimization, with support for GFX10 to GFX11 GPUs and upcoming support for GFX12/RDNA4.
AMD's official Vulkan driver for Linux, "AMDVLK," has dropped support for Polaris and Vega GPUs, causing concern among the community. However, the open-source Mesa RADV driver, maintained by third-party developers, continues to provide optimizations for these aging AMD lineups. The latest optimization brings performance improvements to Vega/GFX9 GPUs, making RADV a viable alternative to AMD's Vulkan driver. While AMD has some catching up to do in the Linux camp, they have already started pushing out patches for next-gen RDNA 4 and introducing new features to the platform.