AMD officially drops Vulkan driver support for Polaris and Vega archs on Linux | Hacker News Reader

AMD officially drops Vulkan driver support for Polaris and Vega archs on Linux

videocardz.com

15 pointsdotnet0010 comments

Apparently this isn't as bad as it sounds. Reason being, there are three drivers for vulkan on Linux with AMD GPUs.

The first one is RADV, part of the mesa project and will continue to receive updates with mesa.

AMDVLK comes in two variants, one open source and one closed source. The open source variant (and maybe the closed source one?) are affected here.

If you want to check which one you're using, try `vulkaninfo | grep driverName`. If it says `radv`, you're good.

Links:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Vulkan

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU

https://docs.mesa3d.org/systems.html

Recently rumored: impending AMD layoffs in China, in the Radeon Technology Group.

Speculation: Maybe RTG is moving development elsewhere due to increasing US restrictions that block sending high-end GPUs and HPC accelerators to China. And/or increasing competition for expert employees, with Chinese domestic GPU chip companies that are receiving government grants. (Implies next generation Radeon may be slower to develop as new GPU software teams might have less experience. New teams might be difficult to motivate to learn intricacies of waning GCN GPU generations as well as current RDNA GPU generations, even though CDNA accelerators are similar to GCN.)

layoffs count to 450 employees, out of 9500 employees (as of DEC 2022)

I'm running a 2015 R9 Fury which lost driver support back in 2021 on Windows.. thankfully I basically only play older or indie games. Is the amdgpu driver for Linux updated for these old cards? I think I saw an update once on Fedora (dual-boot), but wasn't sure

I'm guessing any updates that do happen would be open source contributions rather than AMD's own.

Check if you're using the mesa driver for vulkan.

See my comment here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38032124#38035968

That is... sad. So my Vega 56 and re-flashed Mi25 won't be useful for gaming on Linux anymore?

I'd think they'd have support through Mesa's amdgpu backend.

My understanding is that they just wouldn't get updates, but existing drivers will keep working, and since they're open source, they should at least remain functional for some time.

But it still is a shame, Vega is not that old, and Polaris was very popular. I feel like they might be intentionally cutting them out to try to cause people who were satisfied with those to upgrade.

This only affects the official AMD vulkan driver. Mesa's vulkan driver is still being supported, check if you're using that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38032124#38035968

Reply on news.ycombinator.com