What level of support will they give RADV? Or is it just that AMD ultimately do less?

account42 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

They have done pretty well with the open source OpenGL drivers that were also initially developed outside AMD.

AMDVLK was always a weird regression in the openness of the development model compared to that. Maybe understandable that the bean counters wanted to share the effort between the Windows and AMD drivers but throwing away the community aspect in order to achieve that made that approach doomed from the start IMO. The initial release being incredibly late (even though Vulkan was modeled after AMD's own Mantle) was the cherry on top that allowed RADV to secure the winning seat but probably only accelerated the inevitable.

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pjmlp 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

So well that my Asus Netbook went from OpenGL 4.1 down to OpenGL 3.3, and when it finally got OpenGL 4.1 back, several years later, it died a couple of months later.

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account42 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes exactly, they (or someone else) did eventually add OpenGL 4.1 support for your GPU to the open source drivers which never had it before.

That you were "forced" to switch away from the old proprietary driver for some reason does not negatively implicated AMD's contribution to the open source drivers.

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pjmlp 5 days ago | parent [-]

The reason being the old proprietary driver were dropped from Linux distros without feature parity, and given how great Linux drivers work across kernel versions, everyone got a downgraded experience for several years.

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bigyabai 5 days ago | parent [-]

...and you're telling us it's Linux' fault that you didn't want to pin the package?

	▲	michaelmrose 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Over a period of years people get new machines, upgrade existing machines to new distro versions, and update other packages in a way that is oft incompatible with keeping an older package pinned as its requirements may become incompatible with the requirements of newer packages, kernels, and of course distro versions. I think they are blaming the vendor who received their money not the nebulous and non-specific Linux community. Despite being lauded compared to closed source Nvidia AMD has had painful support issues as well.

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5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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tonyhart7 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

why we have 2 project anyway??? what is the history???

I thought mesa is always default since I use fedora kde

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account42 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

AMD developed their closed source Vulkan driver for Windows based on their proprietary shader compiler from their existing proprietary OpenGL driver (amdgpu-pro). They promised to release this driver as open source but didn't want to release the shader compiler for who knows what reason so this took them a while. Meanwhile David Airlie (Red Hat) and Bas Nieuwenhuizen (student at the time) didn't want to wait for that or were just looking for a challenge and wrote their own open source Vulkan driver (radv) which got pretty good results from the start. Linux distributions prefer open source drivers so this one quickly became the default. One AMD released the open-source version of their driver (amdvlk) it was faster than radv in some games but not decidedly so. It was also not an open project but rather just an open source release of their proprietary driver with a different shader compiler. So there wasn't really any reason for the open source developers to abandon their work on radv and switch to amdvlk. But they could and did use amdvlk to learn from it and improve radv so it was still useful. When Valve decided to contribute directly to Linux graphics drivers, radv was already winning so they backed that one as well.

Note that this is only about the user-space portion of the driver - the kernel part of the Linux drivers is shared by all of these as well as the OpenGL drivers - there used to be a proprietary kernel driver from AMD as well but that was abandoned with the switch to the "amdgpu-pro" package.

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tonyhart7 5 days ago | parent [-]

I thought mesa is linux only driver

so they did use that for windows as well now right

so valve and OSS community make a better driver than amd themselves??? shit is new low

	▲	simoncion 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I thought mesa is linux only driver You thought wrong. From [0] > Mesa is primarily developed and used on Linux systems. But there’s also support for Windows, other flavors of Unix and other systems such as Haiku. Also check out [1] [0] <https://docs.mesa3d.org/systems.html> [1] <https://docs.mesa3d.org/systems.html#deprecated-systems-and-...>

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giancarlostoro 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Idk but MESA never worked for me, ever. Any time I installed a distro to try, if MESA was running, I basically had a non-functioning desktop. I think part of it may have been Wayland related, which is frustrating, but these days its gotten drastically better.

	▲	tankenmate 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		What hardware are you running?

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arghwhat 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They already work on radv, which is already the better vulkan driver.

This is a matter of AMD no longer wasting time on a pointless duplicate project no-one is really interested in. They can allocate more resources for amdgpu and radv and ultimately do less overall by getting rid of the redundant project.

Win-win.

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greatgib 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think that the customer base of AMD cpu and GPU is exploding thanks to their goodwill to work and provide what is needed for linux and open source drivers, so I don't see why they would reduce their effort when it so easily yield so much positive effect for them.

Almost no one is scared anymore to buy AMD for linux desktop and servers knowing that it normally works well and the same kind of person will be the one doing recommendation for their families and relatives or relative companies even if these one are using windows.