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

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.

Comments

Open source GPU is much closer now.

[Gravis Zero]

Perhaps the greatest limiting factor in getting an open source GPU (source for firmware available) has always been implementing drivers and graphics libraries. Vulkan drastically reduced this requirement by creating a common platform for graphics libraries to execute on (see SPIR-V) and this can be a template for drivers. This leaves on two elements locked away: the firmware and the hardware itself. This is a massive reduction in labor for those who wish to bring an open source GPU to the market. It might not be the best/fastest GPU but it will be up to date and as functional as it's counterparts.