Vulkan 1.1 Support Lands In Mesa Git For RADV, ANV

Waking up this morning and preparing for Vulkan 1.1 I wasn't too sure what to expect from the open-source drivers and certainly wouldn't have envisioned in my wildest dreams that by the time of going to sleep there would be initial support merged into Mesa Git on launch-day for a major graphics API update... But open-source developers have achieved just that today.

Vulkan drivers certainly remain leaner than OpenGL and while OpenGL 4.6 isn't yet fully implemented in mainline Mesa for Intel/RadeonSI many months after that update was first unveiled, open-source support has arrived in Mesa Git today for Vulkan 1.1. Granted, Vulkan 1.1 is mostly about promoting existing functionality to "core" and a few new additions.

Intel's Vulkan 1.1 support for the "ANV" driver was merged today to Mesa 18.1-dev Git followed by the RADV support.

So with Mesa Git master tonight, there's Vulkan 1.1 for Intel Broadwell "Gen 8" and newer and then any AMDGPU-supported DRM RADV setup. But you also need to be on Linux 4.14+ for Intel and Linux 4.15+ for RADV to have the necessary Direct Rendering Manager side support.

The code can now be fetched from Mesa Git. Mesa 18.1 should be officially released around late May~June, but thankfully there is an assortment of third-party PPAs/Copr/repositories for those not wanting to build Mesa Git yourself from source.

As a bonus for RADV users, the latest Git code today also finishes up AMD_gcn_shader extension support. This Vulkan extension is used by some games like Wolfenstein and DOOM for allowing faster performance with AMD "Graphics Core Next" GPUs.