As always, I am massively impressed with the progress the Mesa developers have made. The open source Vulkan driver 'radv' has continued to evolve recently.
Recently, this open source driver has added three new supported extensions:
- VK_AMD_negative_viewport_height
- VK_AMD_draw_indirect_count
- VK_KHR_sampler_mirror_clamp_to_edge
Anisotropic filtering is now supported on Sea Islands and Southern Islands cards, which should help with more games.
Mostly recently, a bug fix was committed to stop the driver going into undefined memory, which will fix some random failures in the driver itself.
Dave Airlie has also sent in a patch for initial PRIME support for radv. It's early days yet and Dave said it himself that this is currently "kind of a gross hacks" so it will be a while before it's stable and ready. For those that don't know: PRIME is a way to handle hybrid graphics on Linux.
You can keep track of the progress yourself too, simply go to this page and you can see all the commits labelled "radv" in the commit message.
Recently, this open source driver has added three new supported extensions:
- VK_AMD_negative_viewport_height
- VK_AMD_draw_indirect_count
- VK_KHR_sampler_mirror_clamp_to_edge
Anisotropic filtering is now supported on Sea Islands and Southern Islands cards, which should help with more games.
Mostly recently, a bug fix was committed to stop the driver going into undefined memory, which will fix some random failures in the driver itself.
Dave Airlie has also sent in a patch for initial PRIME support for radv. It's early days yet and Dave said it himself that this is currently "kind of a gross hacks" so it will be a while before it's stable and ready. For those that don't know: PRIME is a way to handle hybrid graphics on Linux.
You can keep track of the progress yourself too, simply go to this page and you can see all the commits labelled "radv" in the commit message.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
Recent examples were posted here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbbQ-XbuhYOc-dHF_J0RBOQ
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Quoting: meggermanQuoting: ShmerlI'm using Nvidia now, but I'm getting an AMD card as soon as Vega chips will come out.
in all honesty i have found the Nvidia desktop and a lot of games too have very bad frame delivery. Sure the FPS is higher but many games don't have that reallybutter smooth 60fps feel that i used to get on windows d3d titles.. that is until i played the same games where i could manage 60fps on the AMD opensource driver and it returned :/
The only thing i have never managed to get out of AMD is peak performance, but if that changes then i will consider AMD.
Agreed, it's always been a bit frustrating to me that on nvidia I could get decent game performance, but have a desktop that would chug, tear and just be a bit inconsistent in general. The first time I experienced a composited desktop on an Intel driver instead, it was a total world of difference in smoothness.
That's what I'm hoping to eventually get with AMD.. The best of both worlds, or near enough.
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Quoting: eldersnakeQuoting: meggermanQuoting: ShmerlI'm using Nvidia now, but I'm getting an AMD card as soon as Vega chips will come out.
in all honesty i have found the Nvidia desktop and a lot of games too have very bad frame delivery. Sure the FPS is higher but many games don't have that reallybutter smooth 60fps feel that i used to get on windows d3d titles.. that is until i played the same games where i could manage 60fps on the AMD opensource driver and it returned :/
The only thing i have never managed to get out of AMD is peak performance, but if that changes then i will consider AMD.
Agreed, it's always been a bit frustrating to me that on nvidia I could get decent game performance, but have a desktop that would chug, tear and just be a bit inconsistent in general. The first time I experienced a composited desktop on an Intel driver instead, it was a total world of difference in smoothness.
That's what I'm hoping to eventually get with AMD.. The best of both worlds, or near enough.
Thats what you never hear about. Just how awful the Nvidia desktop experience is. It doesn't matter if its on a 1080 or a TitanX, compared to some ancient intel IGP on a bargain bucket laptop .. the intel is much smoother and quicker to respond. Tearing and micro stutter or speed up and slow down even on a locked 60fps game is noticeably worse on Nvidia blob than the intel or AMD FOSS driver. Some games however do work very well on Nvidia for smoothness, its just a mixed bag. That said comparing to fglrx i can see why people had no choice but to move to Nvidia.
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