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

Posted by BeauHD on 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.

3 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. He who controls the geeks controls the future by paulatz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Maybe AMD has understood that if you have the geeks on your side, than the next generation of general consumers will be yours as well. Because nobody, except the geeks, can tell two brands of hardware apart but everybody ask their geek family member for advice

    --
    this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
  2. They've done the impossible by zaphirplane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nvidia and firmware makers tell us it's impossible because of 3rd party, security, competitive edge and a whole bunch of what now looks like excuses. I would love to hear from all the nay sayers how it was made possible ;)
    well done, I hope system makers start making intel CPU with AMD GPU (sorry not meant as a back hand compliment)

  3. It is ironic you say that... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Because AMD via AGESA has locked up all that same firmware on both the CPU/Motherboard and GPU platforms as closed source opaque and proprietary modules, same as everyone else.

    What Intel and AMD have done (and Nvidia may have to do in the future in order to survive) is foist the many eyes/bugfixing part for the more resource intensive part of the driver architecture on the open source community, while maintaining control over the aspects which most endanger the end-user, while providing security to the content industry, and backdoors to the intelligence industry.

    Unless we can get new players into both the cpu/motherboard platform ecosystem, and the GPU/Compute ecosystem, we are going to find ourselves with less and less control of own devices, and a harder and harder time of keeping 'secure-ish' hardware performant enough to retain access to modern applications and tools which leverage or require newer devices/memory capacities.

    Until SATA/hard disks get fully replaced we at least have access to higher capacity long term storage, but basically every other peripheral is rapidly leaving pre-ME/PSP/Trustzone hardware in the dust.