In addition to talking about the Valve-backed open-source driver work for old AMD Radeon GPUs, Timur Kristóf also presented at the XDC2025 conference on the state of the RADV Vulkan driver. Timur was joined by Daniel Schürmann to talk about the great Linux gaming experience now possible on the RADV driver with the work done by Valve, AMD, Red Hat, Google, and the open-source community. RADV ray-tracing is much better today than in the past, the ACO compiler back-end has turned out very well, and RADV is all-around a great example of an open-source Vulkan API driver.
The XDC2025 video recordings from September in Vienna were recently uploaded to YouTube. For those curious about the current state of the RADV driver, the video recording of the RADV presentation is embedded below. Not particularly too noteworthy compared to all of the frequent Phoronix articles covering new RADV milestones and merge requests. But for new readers or those that haven’t paid too much attention to RADV+ACO articles in the past, it’s a great summary of the current state of affairs for this AMD Radeon open-source Vulkan driver.
With RADV continuing to support new AMD GPUs punctually, AMD having discontinued AMDVLK in favor of RADV, Vulkan ray-tracing more performant now than in the past, and the Linux gaming needs being satisfied, RADV is in remarkably great shape. Plus the ACO compiler back-end that was started by Valve even now being used by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by default as another win.
The XDC2025 presentation is embedded above and there are also the PDF slides for those interested.
