Slashdot Mirror
AMD Publishes Preview Linux Hybrid Driver With Vulkan, OpenGL 4.5 Support (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: AMD has finally published the previously talked about closed-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux. Announced by AMD via the Phoronix Forums is the new hybrid driver dubbed "AMD GPU-PRO Beta Driver – Linux." This closed-source user-space driver provides the first AMD Vulkan support on Linux along with OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 2.0, and VDPAU video acceleration capabilities. But in using the open-source AMDGPU kernel driver, only the very latest AMD GPUs are currently supported (GCN 1.2+). Update: 03/19 03:22 GMT by T : Sorry for the borked link; now fixed.
It's amazing that people still think that the open source community is some kind of magical software mill at which you can throw software and expect it to come out polished. There's a lot of broken stuff out there that no one bothers to touch. In this case the even bigger problem is that the "community" quite does not have the production capacity compared to a team of professional full-time GPU engineers. Especially when GPU driver code is extremely challenging.