News: 0001592813

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

The State Of The AMD RADV Vulkan Driver In Late 2025

([Radeon] 6 Hours Ago AMD RADV)


In addition to talking about [1]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 [2]PDF slides for those interested.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Old-AMD-Linux-Love-Song

[2] https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/10/contributions/428/attachments/263/351/xdc2025_radv_are_we_there_yet.pdf


Gentlemen,
Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the
approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been
diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by H.M. ship
from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our headquarters.
We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles,
and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty's Government holds
me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, and
spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted
for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence.
Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains
unaccounted for in one infantry battalion's petty cash and there has been
a hideous confusion as the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to
one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This
reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance,
since we are war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise
to you gentlemen in Whitehall.
This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request
elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty's Government so that I
may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains.
I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as
given below. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but
I cannot do both:
1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the
benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or perchance:
2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.
-- Duke of Wellington, to the British Foreign Office,
London, 1812