Engineer who prefers quality over quantity.
AMD GPUs are famous for working very well on Linux. However, what about the very first GCN GPUs? Are they working as well as the new ones? In this post, I’m going to summarize how well these old GPUs are supported and what I’ve been doing to improve them.
After introducing how graphics drivers work in general, I’d like to give a brief overview about what is what in the Linux graphics stack, what are the important parts and what the key projects are where the development happens, as well as what you need to do to get the best user experience out of it.
I’d like to give an overview on how graphics drivers work in general, and then write a little bit about the Linux graphics stack for AMD GPUs. The intention of this post is to clear up a bunch of misunderstandings that people have on the internet about open source graphics drivers.
In the previous post I gave an introduction to shader linking. Mike has already blogged about this topic a while ago, focusing mostly on Zink, and now it’s time for me to share some of my adventures about it too, but of course focusing on how we improved it in RADV and the various rabbit holes that this work has lead me to.
Shader linking is one of the more complicated topics in graphics driver development. It is both a never ending effort in the pursuit of performance and a black hole in which driver developers disappear. In this post, I intend to give an introduction to what shader linking is and why it’s worth spending our time working on it in general.
This is a long-awaited update to the previous mesh shading related posts. RDNA3 brings many interesting improvements to the hardware which simplify how mesh shaders work.
September 1 was a big day! The official cross-vendor Vulkan mesh shading extension that I teased a while ago, has now been officially released. This is a significant moment for me because I’ve spent considerable time making the RADV implementation and collaborated with some excellent people to help shape this extension in Khronos.
NGG (Next Generation Geometry) is the technology that is responsible for any vertex and geometry processing in AMD RDNA GPUs. I decided to do a write-up about my experience implementing it in RADV, which is the Vulkan driver used by many Linux systems, including the Steam Deck. I will also talk about shader culling on RDNA GPUs.
Previously, I gave you an introduction to mesh/task shaders and wrote up some details about how mesh shaders are implemented in the driver. But I left out the important details of how task shaders (aka. amplification shaders) work in the driver. In this post, I aim to give you some details about how task shaders work under the hood. Like before, this is based on my experience implementing task…
In the previous post I gave a brief introduction on what mesh and task shaders are from the perspective of application developers. Now it’s time to dive deeper and talk about how mesh shaders are implemented in a Vulkan driver on AMD HW. Note that everything I discuss here is based on my experience and understanding as I was working on mesh shader support in RADV and is already available as public…