Madiator's CornerAMDVLK has been discontinued as AMD are throwing their "full support" behind RADV | GamingOnLinux
www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/09/amdvlk-has-been-d…
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What do these acronyms mean?
ryannathansAMD Advanced Micro Devices
VLK Vulkan
RADV Radeon Vulkan
RADV is the open source community driver everyone uses. AMDVLK was the official AMD open source driver rarely anyone used
kugmoAMDVLK was the official AMD open source driver rarely anyone used
Depends, if you installed both AMDVLK and RADV, AMDVLK would be the default unless you changed your default Vulkan icd loader. Maybe distros where you don't have to do a lot of DIY and more focused in gaming then RADV was the default. But other distros went with upstream defaults.
Was wondering when this would finally happen, thought it was going to happen years ago
Are you taking notes, Nvidia? This is how you support and gain the trust of your customers.
Haven't they already sort of embraced nvk?
I would say no. They're still releasing their proprietary driver on Linux, and it's still generally the better option for most people in most cases. Perhaps that will change in the coming years, but they're still not putting that much effort into supporting NVK; no gaming distro has yet recommended its users switch, for example.
I feel that but it's a very early driver. I gather they hired the original developer of radv not long ago. They're moving to open kernel modules and (I may have misheard this) but are rearchiteching their kernel driver? I would imagine this would be open like amdgpu? They seem to be doing better with Wayland support as well, which is nice on either front.
They appear to be working hard on Linux desktop experience to better support CUDA workflows but it'll benefit people who just want to play games in the long run.
Can someone explain this like I'm an idiot? Is this good for me or bad for me?
Probably good.
AMD had their own implementation of Vulkan (primarily aimed at their Professional cards) called AMDVLK
The rest of the open source community contributes to radv.
AMD doing their official testing and releases on the Vulkan implementation you're using should help find bugs and they can submit fixes directly to radv
Thank you both for the explanation, all makes sense now!
Good, probably. Radv is generally considered better then amdvlk so having them focus solely on it, I imagine it will only bring good things for it
Except Raytracing where AMDVLK exceeded. Hopefully, Raytracing will improve now that AMD will fully contribute to it.
The gap is fairly narrow if you look at mesa-git performance. This is workload dependent but if anything, RADVs trajectory of improvement in RTRT seems great even without AMD's involvement.