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Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver To Windows (phoronix.com) 16

Posted by BeauHD from the currently-in-the-works dept.
Valve is funding Collabora's experimental effort to port the open-source RADV Vulkan driver from Linux to Windows. The team has already demonstrated Counter-Strike 2 running with RADV, but a stable interface or compatibility shim will be needed to handle undocumented driver changes. Phoronix reports: Louis-Francis Ratte-Boulianne put out a blog post highlighting their initial work on porting RADV to Windows. Besides working on Windows WDDM2 integration for Windows, a big challenge with porting RADV to Windows is on relying on the AMD Radeon Software Windows kernel driver.

It's out-of-scope of this current work for trying to port the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver to Windows, so they are working on bringing RADV to Windows while relying on AMD's official Windows kernel driver. That in turn has led to reverse engineering and other steps for figuring out the proprietary kernel driver's data structures and other elements so RADV can be adapted to use it.

Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver To Windows More | Reply

Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver To Windows

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  • If Muhammad won't come to the mountain, then mountain must go to the Muhammad.

  • Outside of 'opensource, yay' i would have assumed AMD would have made Vulcan available on Windows already? Why does valve need the windows ecosystem to have another driver? What's lacking in the AMD Windows support that Valve's looking to improve with their opensource version?

    I'm totally out of the loop on this and genuinely curious, I've always assumed Windows got first line driver support from manufacturers and the Linux versions were secondary?

    • I guess make it easier for games to run with Vulcan by default so they are easier to run crossplatform ?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      If Linux and Windows use the same graphics API, it will make getting games running on Steam hardware easier. They might even be able to get developers to actually support Linux.

      I wonder if they can get any traction on consoles as well.

      • Vulkan already exists on Windows, so... why? There's even DXVK to make D3D games use Vulkan, which also serves as the basis for RTX Remix.

    • All devs can find and fix bugs in the lower layers. Everybody wins.

      Valve gets a unified stack for its runtime : the same Vulkan/GL implementation running both on Linux and Windows, making support easier.

      • Vulkan is already a cross-platform API and already included in Windows. Every GPU vendor ships Windows Vulkan drivers, so why bother porting one from Linux? The API is the same, but you lose the benefits of a native implementation.

        • How much more native than directly using the AMD hardware driver do you want to get?

          To quote, this port is
          > relying on the AMD Radeon Software Windows kernel driver.

          If finished, this implementation would be as native as what is provided by AMD's windows binary blob.

    • I'm also baffled. Every GPU vendor ships Vulkan drivers bundled in their Windows drivers. There's DXVK to replace DX with VK.

      Why the hell bother porting the Linux driver to Windows when Windows already has it?

    • Because it's old hardware and AMD isn't interested in supporting it.

    • Nobody in the entire thread could be arsed to actually read the blog post but not far in they tell you...

      An open source Vulkan driver on Windows opens up a number of possibilities: a shared codebase across platforms, easier debugging and experimentation, faster turnaround on fixes, and a path for the community (e.g., game developers) to report problems or contribute improvements that benefit everyone regardless of operating system.

  • Considering that a decade ago ( https://www.phoronix.com/news/... [phoronix.com] ) AMD's attempt to upstream an abstraction to keep common code between windows and Linux was rejected, getting the OSS stack on windows would be major, and funny.

  • If AMD's proprietary Vulkan drivers on Windows are so bad that a ported-from-Linux open-source version is better, that's not a good sign for AMD.

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