←back to thread

AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan project is discontinued

(github.com)
123 points haunter | 2 comments | 17 Sep 25 00:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
greatgib ◴[17 Sep 25 07:42 UTC] No.45272998[source]▶

   AMD is unifying its Linux Vulkan driver strategy and has decided to discontinue the AMDVLK open-source project, throwing our full support behind the RADV driver as the officially supported open-source Vulkan driver for Radeon™ graphics adapters.
Scary title but good news in the end I think.
replies(2): >>45273114 #>>45274016 #
willvarfar ◴[17 Sep 25 07:58 UTC] No.45273114[source]▶
What level of support will they give RADV? Or is it just that AMD ultimately do less?
replies(2): >>45273292 #>>45273295 #
account42 ◴[17 Sep 25 08:30 UTC] No.45273292[source]▶
They have done pretty well with the open source OpenGL drivers that were also initially developed outside AMD.

AMDVLK was always a weird regression in the openness of the development model compared to that. Maybe understandable that the bean counters wanted to share the effort between the Windows and AMD drivers but throwing away the community aspect in order to achieve that made that approach doomed from the start IMO. The initial release being incredibly late (even though Vulkan was modeled after AMD's own Mantle) was the cherry on top that allowed RADV to secure the winning seat but probably only accelerated the inevitable.

replies(2): >>45273580 #>>45274612 #
pjmlp ◴[17 Sep 25 11:47 UTC] No.45274612[source]▶
So well that my Asus Netbook went from OpenGL 4.1 down to OpenGL 3.3, and when it finally got OpenGL 4.1 back, several years later, it died a couple of months later.
replies(2): >>45274771 #>>45274835 #
1. account42 ◴[17 Sep 25 12:08 UTC] No.45274835[source]▶
Yes exactly, they (or someone else) did eventually add OpenGL 4.1 support for your GPU to the open source drivers which never had it before.

That you were "forced" to switch away from the old proprietary driver for some reason does not negatively implicated AMD's contribution to the open source drivers.

replies(1): >>45274909 #
2. pjmlp ◴[17 Sep 25 12:14 UTC] No.45274909[source]▶
The reason being the old proprietary driver were dropped from Linux distros without feature parity, and given how great Linux drivers work across kernel versions, everyone got a downgraded experience for several years.