Something I entirely missed when writing about Mesa and OpenGL, is that the open source Vulkan driver "radv" has been merged into Mesa.
See this commit where the magic happened. You can also find Mesa on github.
The radv driver is not yet fully conformant, but fixes have already started rolling in. I imagine getting it fully up to spec won't take long at all.
The next release of Mesa is certainly shaping up to be a rather decent release for open source graphics drivers.
What will be interesting, is seeing what AMD do with their plans to have open source Vulkan support now that radv is part of Mesa directly. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
See this commit where the magic happened. You can also find Mesa on github.
The radv driver is not yet fully conformant, but fixes have already started rolling in. I imagine getting it fully up to spec won't take long at all.
The next release of Mesa is certainly shaping up to be a rather decent release for open source graphics drivers.
What will be interesting, is seeing what AMD do with their plans to have open source Vulkan support now that radv is part of Mesa directly. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Good, but where are all upcoming games that will support Vulkan now? The list still looks quite static on wikipedia, except some Android games.
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Quoting: burnallGood, but where are all upcoming games that will support Vulkan now? The list still looks quite static on wikipedia, except some Android games.No, I think the order goes the other way. First, the spec becomes available and whatnot. Then, you get tools for using it and the graphics card drivers make it even work on people's computers. Sub-step: The drivers and tools reach the point where it runs well and fast.
After that, people writing games will start to think it could be worth using it in their game. There's no point using Vulkan in your game if that means buyers won't be able to run it. So, news like this represents important steps. Only after a few more steps of this sort will it be worth asking where the games are, because right now doing a game using Vulkan is an experiment, not a commercial decision.
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It's only getting better on the oss front! http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=13-Patches-Finish-ST-Mesa-45
Just waiting for AMD to release it's next series, The quicker I can jump back to AMD from this 1080 the better!
Just waiting for AMD to release it's next series, The quicker I can jump back to AMD from this 1080 the better!
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boltronics Oct 8, 2016
Just recompiled Mesa from git and pulled in the Vulkan updates and got that working on my machine. Definitely not ready for prime time, although great to see such progress.
Dota 2 caused a kernel hang after less than a minute the first time I tried it - although that's probably more of an amdgpu kernel module bug. I wouldn't want to trust it for an hour long online game.
The Steam overlay is completely garbled when running the Talos Principle - however I notice this happens on AMDGPU-Pro's proprietary Vulkan drivers too. At one point I also had the background graphic in the menu appear corrupted, although the menu text and in-game graphics seemed okay. I also noticed that I could not select Ultra for all graphical settings if Vulkan was enabled. However the maximum allowed settings did show an improvement of over 10 FPS when compared to Mesa also at those slightly reduced settings (at 2560x1440). Unfortunately the game would also usually crash when switching from Vulkan back to Mesa, as well as freeze up when I tried to exit the game (forcing me to kill the process manually).
The Kronos cube demo shows some flickering, as does the tri demo. Not sure if that's normal, but the other demos don't seem to do that.
vkQuake ran great. Better than Vulkan on AMDGPU-Pro actually, since the proprietary driver would intermittently fail to launch the game (a bug which has been reported).
In short, Mesa's Vulkan support does work and already shows a significant performance improvement over Mesa's OpenGL implementation, but it's probably not stable enough that you'll actually want to use it just yet. Since it was literally just merged yesterday, this shouldn't come as a surprise.
Last edited by boltronics on 8 October 2016 at 4:06 pm UTC
Dota 2 caused a kernel hang after less than a minute the first time I tried it - although that's probably more of an amdgpu kernel module bug. I wouldn't want to trust it for an hour long online game.
The Steam overlay is completely garbled when running the Talos Principle - however I notice this happens on AMDGPU-Pro's proprietary Vulkan drivers too. At one point I also had the background graphic in the menu appear corrupted, although the menu text and in-game graphics seemed okay. I also noticed that I could not select Ultra for all graphical settings if Vulkan was enabled. However the maximum allowed settings did show an improvement of over 10 FPS when compared to Mesa also at those slightly reduced settings (at 2560x1440). Unfortunately the game would also usually crash when switching from Vulkan back to Mesa, as well as freeze up when I tried to exit the game (forcing me to kill the process manually).
The Kronos cube demo shows some flickering, as does the tri demo. Not sure if that's normal, but the other demos don't seem to do that.
vkQuake ran great. Better than Vulkan on AMDGPU-Pro actually, since the proprietary driver would intermittently fail to launch the game (a bug which has been reported).
In short, Mesa's Vulkan support does work and already shows a significant performance improvement over Mesa's OpenGL implementation, but it's probably not stable enough that you'll actually want to use it just yet. Since it was literally just merged yesterday, this shouldn't come as a surprise.
Last edited by boltronics on 8 October 2016 at 4:06 pm UTC
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Yep. This is great news. Also, I don't expect AMD to release a competing open source driver. The radv will be the priority and hopefully AMD will contribute to improve it down the line.
Also now we are at OGL 4.5. I hope they can focus more on bug fixes and things like the shader cache, which has been planned but took at back seat.
Also now we are at OGL 4.5. I hope they can focus more on bug fixes and things like the shader cache, which has been planned but took at back seat.
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buenaventura Oct 10, 2016
Graphics driver's have always been a bit of magic to me. I have a low end AMD card:
And I've always had trouble figuring out how to optimize my usage of it, when/if I can use AMDGPU (and/or -PRO?). Even when asking (ubuntuforums) I find it difficult to follow - I wonder if I should get some custom kernel or so? When?
I recently switched from ubuntu's repo-radeon FOSS driver to padokas to try them out and see if there was a difference, and I can't say I've noticed that much. Are these new features mainly for high end or newer graphic cards?
About shaders, what are they? I played FS2Open (Freespace2) and for a long time it ran horribly even on rock bottom settings, then someone suggested disabling GSLS-shaders and BOOM, all other settings at max and it looks stunning. Why is that?
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Mullins [Radeon R4/R5 Graphics] [1002:9851] (rev 05) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])And I've always had trouble figuring out how to optimize my usage of it, when/if I can use AMDGPU (and/or -PRO?). Even when asking (ubuntuforums) I find it difficult to follow - I wonder if I should get some custom kernel or so? When?
I recently switched from ubuntu's repo-radeon FOSS driver to padokas to try them out and see if there was a difference, and I can't say I've noticed that much. Are these new features mainly for high end or newer graphic cards?
About shaders, what are they? I played FS2Open (Freespace2) and for a long time it ran horribly even on rock bottom settings, then someone suggested disabling GSLS-shaders and BOOM, all other settings at max and it looks stunning. Why is that?
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Quoting: buenaventuraAnd I've always had trouble figuring out how to optimize my usage of it, when/if I can use AMDGPU (and/or -PRO?).
As an Nvidia user, I have the same problem. Too many names to keep track of. If I switch to AMD, I'll have some studying to do.
Quoting: buenaventuraAbout shaders, what are they?
Shaders are little programs than run on your GPU. They replaced the fixed logic that present in the rendering pipeline of the older graphics cards (then 3D accelerators). What's a rendering pipeline? Uhm, if you really want to know more about the subject, have a study session on the internet. It's a fascinating subject, but it can be quite hard when you first start out.
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buenaventura Oct 10, 2016
Quoting: EhvisQuoting: buenaventuraAnd I've always had trouble figuring out how to optimize my usage of it, when/if I can use AMDGPU (and/or -PRO?).
As an Nvidia user, I have the same problem. Too many names to keep track of. If I switch to AMD, I'll have some studying to do.
Quoting: buenaventuraAbout shaders, what are they?
Shaders are little programs than run on your GPU. They replaced the fixed logic that present in the rendering pipeline of the older graphics cards (then 3D accelerators). What's a rendering pipeline? Uhm, if you really want to know more about the subject, have a study session on the internet. It's a fascinating subject, but it can be quite hard when you first start out.
Hum, well, I guess I'll leave it at that :P It was funny how just disabling GSLS instantly made my FS2 game run super nice on mega settings, but perhaps that was just some bug in that game and not anything to do with shaders in general.
If I could wish for an article, it would be a "what foss driver to use for your graphics card, and HOW!" or some such, with like nice tables describing each case, updated regularly with news etc. And also, in depth how-tos on how to enable stuff in kernels and such. I am quite skilled at other terminal-operations and linux-know-how, but this stuff has always confused me - there seem to be no simple answers/wikis.
edit: wtf quote tags
Last edited by buenaventura on 10 October 2016 at 11:04 am UTC
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