
AMD Finally Pushing Out Open-Source Vulkan Driver - vanburen
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-open-vulkan&num=1
======
kilburn
For those who -like me- don't know much about what this means, here goes a
summary:

There are basically two ways to program graphics on linux: OpenGL and Vulkan.
OpenGL is older and more high-level, while Vulkan is newer and lower level,
which should let programmers extract the most out of your hardware (at a
development cost).

On the OpenGL front AMD open sourced and pushed for their RadeonSI driver. It
works fine, although some say that its performance is somewhat worse than the
(closed source) nvidia drivers.

On the Vulkan front, two years ago AMD promised to open source their driver
some day. They've now announced that the source release is imminent. However,
this is a driver they've developed to share as much as possible between
windows and linux, and hence it doesn't "play along" with the linux-specific
inter-driver sharing efforts (Mesa [1]).

Due to the long-shot promise, one guy developed RADV: a Vulkan driver that
builds on Mesa. The advantage of this driver is that since it's always been
open source and plays well with the linux driver-sharing efforts, it's been
packaged on most distros and is really easy to use. The disadvantge is that
its performance is lackluster. RADV's author has stated that he will continue
to work on it despite AMD finally open-sourcing their Vulkan driver. People
hope that having access to the AMD Vulkan driver will allow RADV to reap some
optimitzations from it.

At this point you are ready to check the very recent benchmarks to see how
performance compares between opengl/vulkan and radv/amd's vulkan driver [2].
TL/DR: NVidia propietary driver > RadeonSI OpenGL > AMD's Vulkan > RADV. I
don't know how they compare drivers' performance between NVidia and AMD, but
this seems to be the sentiment.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_%28computer_graphics%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_%28computer_graphics%29)

[2]
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amdgpu-1...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amdgpu-1750-open&num=1)

------
bryanlarsen
My rant on my frustrations with the NVidia Linux drivers obviously struck a
nerve a few days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877262](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877262)

Between ROCm and GPUOpen, the AMD software team really seems to be setting
themselves up for success. If their hardware team hits a home run or Nvidia
makes a misstep, perhaps we could see a significant shift in market share.

~~~
discoursism
I'm not quite clear on what you're saying here. Whose nerve did your rant
strike?

~~~
DiThi
Everybody that upvoted that comment to the top, at least.

------
Honeybunch
The only downside I see to this is that the Vulkan space for AMD will leave
OpenGL development in the dust. The OpenGL drivers for AMD cards have been sub
par on Windows and Linux for a long time. This doesn't matter much for AAA
games but smaller games and most non-game applications don't need and
shouldn't want to use Vulkan.

That said as someone who does a bunch of Vulkan development on AMD platforms
on Linux I'm really excited. There's nothing bad with some healthy
competition.

~~~
ktta
Is that such a bad thing? Any game dev that's not going to use Vulkan will use
a game engine, which will pretty much handle vulkan for them.

I'm excited because Vulkan support will mean better GPU compute support across
platforms.

~~~
Honeybunch
Not necessarily. I see a few small games that roll their own OpenGL/DX11
engines due to unique requirements that game engines can't easily accommodate.
I don't have any good examples off the top of my head but it's not uncommon to
see indie game blog posts talking about why they're not using Unity/Unreal

~~~
outworlder
Minecraft would be one.

Bigger games, Elite Dangerous rolled its own, which is able to use both OpenGL
and DX (even though the OpenGL support is no longer useful).

Most indie games do not roll their own, however.

------
ajr0
future repo?

[https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers](https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers)

~~~
rys
Yup, that’s where I’ll flip the switches to make the other repos public, when
we’re ready to set the code free.

