Radeon News Archives

A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.

A new patch series posted today is of interest and is for firmware-assisted shadowing for AMD RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics processors as it's necessary for proper SR-IOV support.

It's been nearly one month since AMDVLK 2023.Q1.2 as AMD's latest open-source Vulkan driver code drop while today it was replaced by AMDVLK 2023.Q1.3 as what will likely be their last Vulkan driver update for the quarter.

AMD is working to enable VirtIO GPU and pass-through GPU support for the Xen virtualization hypervisor with Radeon graphics.

As part of an AMD effort to enhance the performance of the AMD Linux graphics drivers when running in a virtualized environment, a set of initial patches are pending for Mesa that implement native context support for VirtIO.

AMD today published Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1 as the newest version of this cross-platform and open-source physically-based rendering engine.

Since late 2020 there had been work by AMD Linux engineers on adding Smart Access Memory (Resizable BAR) support to RadeonSI as the Gallium3D OpenGL driver and improved since that point in the name of performance. However, for this OpenGL driver now they've come to realize the benefits haven't necessarily panned out and the developers went ahead and disabled this SAM/ReBAR support followed by removing the support from this driver.

If you are an AMD Radeon RX 7900 series "RDNA3" GPU owner and don't mind running bleeding-edge open-source graphics driver code, you'll want to pull down today's Mesa 23.1-devel Git snapshot.

For those with an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT or RX 7900 XTX graphics card, the latest Mesa 23.1-devel code as of Friday has seen a number of fixes land for benefiting the GFX11/RDNA3 graphics processors.

AMD today released xf86-video-amdgpu 23.0 as their first X.Org DDX display driver update in one year.

The Rusticl Rust-based OpenCL driver implementation that was merged last year into Mesa 22.3 has been an extremely promising effort. One of the issues though is that with the current mainline state inside Mesa has lacked support for working with AMD Radeon GPUs via the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, but that is now coming to fruition.

Out today is AMDVLK 2023.Q1.2 as AMD's second open-source Vulkan Linux driver release of the year.

AMD's GPUOpen team has published the source code for their FidelityFX FSR2 v2.2 update. This update brings improved image quality for more cases, integration enhancements, a new debug API checker, and other refinements over the earlier FSR2 code.

AMD has made some late changes for Linux 6.2 around the Scatter/Gather (S/G) functionality for APUs that enables display scan-out from system memory.

AMD ROCm 5.4 was released back in November while since then it has continue to be refined with new point releases to address various issues with this open-source Linux GPU compute stack.

The work led by Red Hat's David Airlie on supporting Vulkan Video with the Mesa RADV driver has seen the work mainlined today for Mesa 23.1!

AMD sent in another batch of AMDGPU features and fixes to DRM-Next this week ahead of the Linux 6.3 merge window. With being late in the cycle the material is mostly of different fixes -- including some Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" (GFX11) fixes -- but also a new feature in that AMD Radeon GPU power savings with S0ix even when the system BIOS support is lacking.

Just prior to Christmas there was a "request for comments" (RFC) patch series sent out working on RDNA3 user-mode queue support for their AMDGPU kernel driver. That work has now advanced post-RFC with an updated patch series having been sent out on Friday.

For those making use of the new Radeon RX 7900 series "RDNA3" graphics cards on Linux, the open-source Mesa driver code has seen nearly three dozen patches merged yesterday providing a variety of small updates to this support.

AMDVLK 2023.Q1.1 is out today as the first update to this official open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver for 2023. Given the month and a half since the prior update, this AMDVLK update is rather significant with all of its changes.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver's implementation of the graphics pipeline library (VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library) is becoming much faster thanks to fast-linking and various pending fixes. In turn this will get games making use of the extension the ability to ideally have no shader pre-caching while still enjoying no in-game stuttering. Valve's Linux graphics driver developers working on RADV have been working through some issues with the RADV graphics pipeline library and for Mesa 23.1 looks like it could be in good shape.

Along with Intel's DRM-Next material shifting to more bug fixing, AMD's AMDGPU/AMDKFD Direct Rendering Manager driver changes this week have shifted over to delivering more graphics driver fixes.

Most of the Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver development has been done by the likes of Valve, Google, and Red Hat engineers with it being an "unofficial" driver while AMD supports AMDVLK as their official open-source Vulkan driver as well as supporting their closed-source AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan driver too that shares common code with their Windows Vulkan driver. It was pleasant to see AMD this week though submitting new feature code to RADV.

AMD sent out a set of 32 kernel patches today for their AMDKFD/AMDGPU kernel driver code in providing upstream support for debugging of their GPU compute instruction set architecture (ISA).

On Friday AMD sent out another round of feature patches for new kernel graphics driver material they have readied in advance of the Linux 6.3 kernel cycle.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for dynamic blend equations to help with the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation and ideally lead to less stuttering.

Another batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature code was submitted this week to DRM-Next as additional AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver changes slated for Linux 6.3.

ROCm 5.4 released in November with a point release then coming out in December and now there is another minor update for January to this open-source AMD Linux GPU compute stack.

AMD today sent in a batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver fixes for the in-development Linux 6.2. Notable with this week's AMD graphics driver fixes are a few pertaining to the new Radeon RX 7000 series / RDNA3 hardware.

Following last month's launch of the Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards, AMD's GPUOpen group has now published the instruction set architecture (ISA) programming guide for those interested in RDNA3 GPUs.

A six month old merge request to Mesa was finally merged today for enabling Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) support with the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver.

AMD sent out an initial batch of "new stuff" for their AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel graphics driver code to begin queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.3 cycle kicking off during the back-half of February.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team has landed a few patches into Mesa 23.0 for further reducing the CPU overhead of the Vulkan driver's draw path.

The open-source R600 Gallium3D driver for supporting up through the Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards on Linux has an interesting new year addition... ARB_gl_spirv!

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been working with the Quake II RTX and DOOM Eternal games for a while now and recently the performance has also picked up nicely as shown in recent benchmarks. But for the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions to be exposed has required setting the RADV_PERFTEST=rt environment variable, but that has now changed initially for those two games.

Earlier this month prolific open-source GPU driver developer David Airlie at Red Hat picked up work again on Vulkan Video support for the RADV driver. Initially that RADV Vulkan Video work was focused on H.264 and H.265 video decoding while since then he has shifted focus to preliminary video encode support with H.264.

More than a few Phoronix readers have written in that have been early adopters to the Linux 6.1 kernel released as stable earlier this month and now finding their HDMI audio outputs no longer working. Fortunately, the issue has been sorted out by upstream developers and a fix is on the way.

A request for comments patch series sent out by AMD Linux graphics driver engineers ahead of the holidays is implementing support for user-mode queues in conjunction with Radeon RX 7000 "Navi 3x" graphics cards and newer.

AMD today capped off their busy week by releasing ROCm 5.4.1 as the newest version of their open-source compute stack.

AMD today published the AMDVLK 2022.Q4.4 open-source Vulkan driver that provides Navi 31 GPU support for this week's launch of the Radeon RX 7900 XT / RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.

AMD's GPUOpen group has announced the AMD Device Library eXtra "ADLX" software development kit intended to help improve integration with third-party software. While nice in theory, for now at least it's Windows-only.

The last piece of the open-source driver equation for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 "RDNA3" series support on Linux is now properly upstream.

As outlined yesterday the Radeon RX 7900 series can work on the upstream, open-source Linux driver stack if using Linux 6.0+ and Mesa 22.2 (but ideally 22.3+). But if you aren't wanting to jump to a newer kernel version and are running one of the supported enterprise Linux distributions, today AMD released their Radeon Software for Linux 22.40 driver package with Radeon RX 7000 "RDNA3" series support.

Ahead of next week's Radeon RX 7900 series hitting retail availability, AMD today issued a new AMDVLK driver update as their official open-source Vulkan Linux driver.

Following several ROCm 5.3 point releases, AMD today shipped ROCm 5.4 as the newest version of their open-source Linux GPU compute stack.

Open-source graphics driver engineer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux team landed a number of stream-out fixes this week for RADV's Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) Stream-Out handling.

This summer AMD announced the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer "RRA" as part of their developer software suite for helping to profile ray-tracing performance/issues on Windows and Linux with both Direct3D 12 and the Vulkan API. Initially the RRA 1.0 release was binary-only but now AMD has made good on their "GPUOpen" approach and made it open-source.

AMD has been putting out a number of ROCm compute stack point releases recently with ROCm 5.3.3 having been the latest to premiere on Thursday.

Following last week's batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD changes slated for Linux 6.2, on Friday another round of feature patches were sent in for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.2 cycle. There is continued work around new IP blocks presumably for RDNA3 and MI300 graphics while given the more modularized development approach with block-by-block enablement makes it harder to ascertain the current status.

Following AMDVLK 2022.Q4.1 from late October, AMDVLK 2022.Q4.2 is now available as AMD's latest official open-source Vulkan Linux driver update for both gamers and enterprise customers.