AMD finally abandons its Amdvlk volcano driver
In the Linux world, Amdvlk is making way for the community driver Radv, and AMD intends to support its development in the future.
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Anyone still using AMD's own “Open-Source Driver For Vulkan” (Amdvlk) under Linux should soon switch to the alternative Vulkan driver Radv. AMD discontinued the development of Amdvlk in mid-September and refers to Radv instead. Vulkan is a hardware-related graphics API, analogue to Microsoft's DirectX 12.
Radv is also open source, but has so far been developed largely without AMD's involvement. It is part of the Mesa graphics library and driver collection and utilizes parts of the infrastructure also used by other Mesa drivers. The development is community-driven – so far; Valve in particular has been involved. The company uses AMD's combined processors in the Steam Deck handheld PC and is therefore significantly interested in progress.
Focus on a single driver
In a statement on GitHub, an AMD developer writes: “To optimize development and strengthen our commitment to the open-source community, AMD is unifying its Linux Vulkan driver strategy and has decided to discontinue the Amdvlk open-source project. We are now throwing our full support behind the Radv driver as the officially supported open source Vulkan driver for Radeon graphics cards.”
This standardization has been on the cards for months. In June, AMD abandoned the last remnants of its proprietary 3D graphics driver for Linux.
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AMD continues to encourage developers to participate in the further development of Radv. There is also the Radeonsi driver for OpenGL.
Radv has been delivering higher frame rates than the Amdvlk driver in many games and applications for some time. Only in the case of ray tracing graphics effects has the now discontinued driver been considered to be better performing.
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