AMD Releases Latest Vulkan Driver with Ray Tracing for Radeon GPUs and Enhanced Features for Quake 2

AMD has finally released the long-awaited AMDVLK Vulkan driver for its Radeon GPU, which offers numerous optimizations for ray tracing and other improvements. This means that the long-awaited Q3 update is now available and AMD releases its own Radeon Vulkan drivers, while MESA Vulkan drivers continue to lead the way. AMD’s approach with the AMDVLK drivers on Linux had raised concerns among many users, as the company had throttled the pace of updates and new patches. Now, the driver update scheduled for the third quarter has finally been released, even though we are already at the end of the quarter. However, this new update contains concentrated optimizations and bug fixes.

AMD has thus introduced important innovations for the platform. This latest driver update brings the “Quadbuffer Stereo” feature, which improves performance when multitasking. This is especially important for developers running Linux. AMD has also implemented numerous other improvements, including ray tracing support for Quake 2 and various optimizations. The full list of changes can be found below (via Phoronix):

[New features and improvements.]

• Update of Khronos Vulkan headers to version 1.3.261
• Support for Quadbuffer Stereo
• Performance optimization for Quake2 RTX RT
• Reduction of overhead between RS64 and F32 mode
• Added setting to change PWS mode
• Reduction of amdvlk binary size
• Optimization of shaders for clearing to single values
• Support for dynamic sample buffer information for the Extended_dynamic_state3 extension

[Fixed issues.]

• Driver still reports HDR formats even if HDR mode is disabled
• CTS error in dEQP-VK.pipeline.monolithic.executable_properties.graphics.vertex_stage*
• Crash when calling vkCreateRenderPass2
• Debug markers missing in RGD