To no real surprise given the happenings (or there the lack of) the past few months, AMD formally announced publicly today that their open-source AMDVLK driver has been discontinued in favor of the Mesa RADV driver for Vulkan needs on Linux.
Back in May AMD announced they would begin officially supporting the Mesa RADV driver as part of their packaged Radeon Software for Linux. In turn they would be dropping their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers from Radeon Software for Linux.
Since then there have not been any new AMDVLK releases. Earlier this month I called it dead within Four Months Have Passed Since The Last AMDVLK Driver Release. Today it’s been officially confirmed that the AMDVLK driver is discontinued.
Via the AMDVLK GitHub:
“In a move to streamline development and strengthen our commitment to the open-source community, 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.
This consolidation allows us to focus our resources on a single, high-performance codebase that benefits from the incredible work of the entire open-source community. We invite developers and users alike to utilize the RADV driver and contribute to its future.”
This is a good but long overdue decision by AMD. RADV has long been more popular with gamers/enthusiasts on Linux than their own official driver. Thanks to Valve, Google, Red Hat, and others, RADV has evolved very nicely. More recently with the Vulkan ray-tracing maturing well and other remaining gaps addressed for workstation, compute, and other areas, it only makes sense now going all-in on RADV for AMD Vulkan support on Linux.
