AMD released three updates this week with Vulkan improvements: The 18.12.2 Radeon driver, Vulkan Memory allocator and the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver. The AMDVLK 2018.Q4.4 update enables some additional features to allow up to 5% performance gains for tessellation workloads, enables the atomic optimizer, updates the Vulkan headers against v1.1.94, enables primitive under estimation for VK_EXT_conservative_rasterization, and has a number of fixes. The Vulkan Memory allocator sees many major changes including the addition of structure member VmaVulkanFunctions::vkCmdCopyBuffer. And finally the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 18.12.2 sees improved Vulkan support with 3 new extensions: VK_EXT_inline_uniform_block, VK_KHR_swapchain_mutable_format, VK_EXT_scalar_block_layout. Additionally Sparse Support is enabled.
Rys Sommefeldt, who looks after the Game Engineering group in Europe which is part of the Radeon Technologies Group at AMD, has written a short blog on decoding radeon Vulkan versions. Rys writes “We have a practical problem that will be familiar to anyone in the midst of developing any complex packaged software: we need to ship multiple driver components developed at different cadences and in certain ways, all packaged together and distributed, to be installed as a unit.” Read on to learn about his solution.
AMD just released Radeon HD 6000-series mobile model GPUs: the Radeon HD 6500M and Radeon HD 6300M. OpenGL 4.1 and OpenCL 1.1 support is included as well as DirectX compatibility.
ALT Software has won a contract with the Chinese Aeronautical Radio Electronics Research Institute (CARERI) to provide embedded graphics display drivers and hardware design services for the ATI Radeon E4690 and Radeon X1400 graphics processors for deployment in next-generation avionics display systems. ALT Software has been a leading provider of OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC display drivers for avionics systems for well over a decade.