Radeon News Archives

AMD has issued a formal announcement now for the ROCm 5.6 compute stack release that was already covered on Phoronix earlier today. In AMD's announcement of ROCm 5.6 though there is a tease of what's to come later this year...

It was just one month ago that ROCm 5.5.1 debuted while overnight AMD has promoted ROCm 5.6 to stable with more improvements and a particular focus on enhancing the AI capabilities for Radeon GPUs and Instinct accelerators. The ROCm 5.6 release also arrives just two weeks after AMD CEO Lisa Su re-affirmed their support for ROCm and working with the community to further enhance it.

Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver has merged support for VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock, which is a highly sought after extension by game emulators and also important for DirectX over Vulkan layering efforts and more.

On a quest toward trying to get the game Halo Infinite running under Linux via Steam Play (Proton) with AMD GFX6 / GCN 1.0 era graphics processors, Valve's prolific open-source driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset has added VK_NV_device_generated_commands support for these original Radeon GCN GPUs.

AMDVLK 2023.Q2.3 is out today as the newest snapshot of AMD's official open-source Vulkan driver.

FreeSync Panel Replay is a new feature for AMD Ryzen laptops with the DCN v3.1.4 display block or newer for helping to reduce power usage when the screen contents are unchanged.

For some months now RADV ray-tracing has been enabled on a per-game basis while finally today in a change for next quarter's Mesa 23.2 release is RADV ray-tracing support being exposed by default for all software.

In recent months AMD open-source graphics driver engineers seem to be taking more interest in supporting the Xen hypervisor with their graphics hardware. It's not clear yet externally if this is just due to customer demand or other yet-to-be-announced interest in Xen.

AMD engineer Qiang Yu has recently been working on bringing support for Valve's ACO compiler from RADV over to the RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver as an alternative to using the default AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler. More code has landed this week in furthering the effort.

While there is already RadeonSI driver support for the Rust OpenCL "Rusticl" implementation in Mesa since v23.1, merged now for Mesa 23.2 is experimental support for Rusticl with the older Radeon R600g for pre-GCN graphics cards.

Mesa 23.1's RADV driver added initial support for Vulkan Video with select video formats while now a set of patches have been merged to Mesa 23.2-devel for making the H.265 (HEVC) decoding more robust.

Back in March the AMD Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1 finished transitioning to HIP for using AMD's HIP C++ interface rather than OpenCL for newer Radeon GPUs. Following that, the Radeon ProRender plug-ins have also now finished being converted over to using HIP on AMD Radeon Vega (GFX9) GPUs and newer.

On Friday a big set of patches affecting the AMDGPU/Radeon/AMDKFD kernel drivers were submitted for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 6.5 kernel merge window opens in the coming weeks. A lot of new feature code is part of this pull for benefiting new hardware, continuing to refine AMD GPU power management under Linux, and more.

For those interested in GPU overclocking, AMD has posted the patches for implementing the "legacy" OverDrive overclocking infrastructure for newer SMU13-based Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards with the AMDGPU open-source Linux kernel driver.

AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have out a rather significant set of patches this week to their display code "DC" for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

Following the release at the start of the month of ROCm 5.5, today it's been succeeded by the ROCm 5.5.1 point release.

Melissa Wen of Igalia along with developers from AMD and Valve have been working on improved AMD color management support with a particular focus on the Steam Deck but will also benefit other AMD Radeon Linux users as well.

The Radeon Software for Linux driver was quietly updated earlier this month with one noted fix.

It's been over one month since the release of AMDVLK 2023.Q2.1 while today it's been succeeded by the AMDVLK 2023.Q2.2 update.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has implemented smooth lines support for in turn to be leveraged by the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed a new set of patches for Mesa 23.2 that are further optimizing the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for lower overhead in some code paths.

There's a new open-source Vulkan driver in development by an independent developer that is working on providing support for aging Radeon HD 6000 series "Northern Islands" graphics processors.

Beginning today with the newest Mesa 23.2-devel code, the environment variable option AMD_DEBUG=useaco is now available for telling the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to use Valve's ACO shader compiler back-end rather than the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end for supported shader types.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has added support for the small but useful VK_EXT_tooling_info extension.

Going back to last year there's been AMD GFX940 work within the LLVM compiler for its AMDGPU compiler back-end. That AMD GFX940 should align to the Instinct MI300 while introduced to the latest LLVM compiler code today are new GFX941 and GFX942 targets.

While there are sadly many tech layoffs happening, one company that continues hiring at least on the Linux side is AMD. A new job posting was made today with AMD looking to recruit another developers to work on their open-source Linux graphics driver stack -- in particular, with the AMD Radeon Mesa code.

At the end of last year AMD's GPUOpen group released the Render Pipeline Shaders "RPS" SDK for graphics applications and engines leveraging Direct3D 12 or Vulkasn as an open-source render graph framework. On Wednesday the Render Pipeline Shaders SDK 1.1 was released and is complemented by Linux support.

A set of patches to the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver and Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver would allow more easily relaying information about the reasons why a GPU hang/reset occur so that the user-space software can be more informed about any issues.

As expected following yesterday's AMD Git activity, ROCm 5.5 was officially released overnight as AMD's latest version of their open-source GPU compute stack that is their alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA or Intel's oneAPI / Level Zero.

AMD has begun publishing ROCm 5.5 source packages for the Radeon Open eCosystem components making up their GPU compute stack that is also being extended to cover Xilinx products and more.

AMD has contributed support to Mesa's VA-API Gallium3D state tracker for supporting AV1 video encoding.

While AMD has yet to launch the Radeon RX 7600 or RX 7600 series graphics cards (sans the RX 7700S), AMD's GPUOpen tooling has seen new releases today in preparation for those forthcoming RDNA3 GPUs.

For those making use of the Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver within Mesa for supporting the Radeon HD 2000 series through the HD 6000 series (pre-GCN) graphics cards, Mesa 23.2 is finally ready to drop its TGSI code path for what was once the default intermediate representation (IR) used by Gallium3D drivers but in more recent years NIR has become the preferred IR format.

Yesterday just hours after writing about a RADV optimization by Valve for an "upcoming game" to nearly match the performance they see under Windows, another performance improvement for an "upcoming game" has been merged.

AMD has published AMDVLK 2023.Q2.1 as their first official open-source Vulkan driver update for the quarter that for Linux users serves as an alternative to the Mesa RADV driver or the code bundled up into their Radeon Software packaged driver.

Back in 2019 Valve developers introduced the ACO compiler back-end within Mesa for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver. This alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler has been instrumental in helping RADV perform very well for Linux gaming both with Vulkan native titles as well as games going the route of DirectX to Vulkan via DXVK and VKD3D with Proton (Steam Play). On and off there's been talk and work towards bringing ACO to RadeonSI Gallium3D for OpenGL while now there is some new work on this front.

While we are basically past the cut-off of new feature material to into DRM-Next that wants to be part of the upcoming Linux 6.4 merge window, this week AMD sent in a fixes-oriented set of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver updates that does include some minor feature updates.

Ahead of hopefully enabling the RADV Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries "GPL" support by default for this quarter's Mesa 23.1 release, the RADV driver has now landed on-disk shader caching support for GPL libraries.

A currently-testing implementation of VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock has been published for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver. This Vulkan fragment shader interlock support is used by some game emulators as well as being useful in running Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan and similar purposes.

The AMDGPU kernel driver patch flow has ticked up in recent days with working on new hardware support/features.

Merged to Mesa 23.1-devel yesterday was UMD metadata v2 support for the RADV and RadeonSI drivers to provide extra metadata that can be optionally enabled to help with Radeon GPU debugging.

Over the weekend I wrote about AMD beginning to post new graphics driver patches for a new GPU. As pointed out in that earlier article, it looks to be a new AMD Instinct MI300 / "Aldebaran" GPU model and today more patches were posted that further confirm this target.

A pending change to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is leading to much lower system RAM use for some games that make use of many Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries (GPL). The game causing this issue to be investigated was Valve's Dota 2 on RADV and is now seeing an 85% reduction in system RAM use by this open-source Radeon Linux driver.

AMD on Friday sent out new patches for enabling some new graphics IP "blocks" as part of their block-by-block enablement strategy they've been using to introduce new GPU support to their Linux graphics stack by focusing on smaller patch series with versioned parts of the GPU rather than big monolithic patch series with colorful fishy codenames.

AMD has been teasing FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) as the latest version of their game upscaling tech that will be released later in the year. AMD began showing off FSR 3 to game developers this week at GDC while also re-affirming their open-source commitment.

Sent out today were the latest AMDGPU Display Core "DC" patches having the latest work done by AMD internally on this display/monitor portion of their driver code. Notable with this round of 19 patches is preparation work for upcoming eDP 1.5 laptop displays.

While not part of the upcoming Blender 3.5 release, AMD engineers are working to land their HIP ray-tracing (HIPRT) support within the Blender open-source 3D modeling software that will offer nice rendering speed-ups for AMD RDNA2/RDNA3 GPUs.

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.