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      AMD make switching between Vulkan drivers AMDVLK and RADV easier

      Liam Dawe · news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Friday, 8 January, 2021 - 13:08 · 1 minute

    On Linux with AMD GPUs you can decide between the RADV and AMDVLK drivers for Vulkan API support, and it appears AMD want to make things a little easier for you.

    It can get a little confusing so here's the real basics: AMDVLK is the "official" external Vulkan driver developed by AMD, whereas RADV is part of Mesa and comes with most distributions by default. Sometimes certain games work better on one, sometimes on the other. Additionally, AMD only directly support Ubuntu and Red Hat, whereas Mesa with RADV focuses on everything they can.

    With the latest AMDVLK 2021.Q1.1 release, AMD has made switching between the two a little easier. With this driver installed, you only need to set an environment variable to tell whatever game or application you're using what driver to use with "AMD_VULKAN_ICD" set to either "AMDVLK" or "RADV". The default is AMDVLK of course, if none is set.

    Here's the highlights of this new driver release:

    New feature and improvement

    • Add AMD switchable graphics layer to switch AMD Vulkan driver between amdvlk and RADV
    • Update Khronos Vulkan Headers to 1.2.164
    • Navi21 performance tuning for game X-Plane, Madmax, Talos Principle, Rise of Tomb Raider, F12017

    Issue fix

    • RPCS3 Corruption observed on Game window on Navi10

    See more on GitHub .

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