Whereas AMD formally helps a a lot narrower vary of newer Radeon {hardware} with their official graphics drivers for Home windows (and Linux – because it pertains to their Radeon Software program for Linux packaged driver and AMDVLK official Vulkan driver), due to the open-source group round AMD’s open-source driver code there are at all times nifty issues that come about… As I wrote about earlier this yr, an impartial developer has been striving to carry Vulkan to the Radeon HD 6000 sequence. Sure, the 13 yr outdated “Northern Islands” graphics processors.
Earlier than getting too excited over prospects of working Vulkan in your outdated TeraScale 2/3 graphics playing cards, it has been a sluggish course of for this Vulkan driver dubbed “Terakan”. Over the summer season lead developer “Triang3l” was engaged on the very fundamental items for this Mesa-based Vulkan driver. Quick ahead a number of months, he is making extra seen progress.
As of final week he is now been capable of render his first triangles being drawn with an actual Vulkan pipeline on this driver. That is making use of the shader compiler in use by the Radeon R600g Gallium3D driver. The developer tweeted a number of the first triangles on this Vulkan driver working on Radeon HD 6000 sequence {hardware}:
It is fairly an achievement for working Vulkan on GPUs launched lengthy earlier than the trade commonplace API was conceived. And it is nice for exhibiting the probabilities and ingenuity of the open-source group. Will probably be fascinating to see how far this Terakan driver evolves and what number of Vulkan extensions find yourself being succesful to realistically assist on the Radeon HD 6000 sequence {hardware}. Do not anticipate fashionable Vulkan video games (or slightly, Steam Play video games utilizing Direct3D and working on Vulkan through DXVK/VKD3D-Proton for Vulkan) to magically run effectively on these outdated Radeon GPUs, however that is an fascinating technical achievement however and could also be helpful for some lighter video games or as extra desktops/compositors discover Vulkan API use, amongst different doable makes use of.
