AMD Is Open-Sourcing Their Official Vulkan Linux Driver (phoronix.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @10:00PM from the long-overdue dept.

An anonymous reader writes: While many of you have likely heard of the "RADV" open-source Vulkan driver, it's been a community-written driver up to this point in the absence of AMD's official, cross-platform Vulkan driver being open-source. That's now changed with AMD now open-sourcing their official Vulkan driver. The code drop is imminent and they are encouraging the use of it for quick support of new AMD hardware, access to the Radeon GPU Profiler, easy integration of AMD Vulkan extensions, and enabling third-party extensions. For now at least it does provide better Vulkan performance than RADV but the RADV developers have indicated they plan to continue development of their Mesa-based Vulkan driver.

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Re:He who controls the geeks controls the future by Anonymous Coward · 2017-12-12 22:36 · Score: 4, Informative

AMD has understood this like a decade ago. They've invested _a lot_ in open source graphics stack, release the specs (even they still have proprietary FGLXR driver), and SUSE employs developers who solely do Radeon drivers based on these specs. You gotta be slightly careful when getting cards, but all in all, the open source driver is freaking fantastic (on older R280 mine beating FGLXR in performance on most open source games).
Check out https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/