They have done pretty well with the open source OpenGL drivers that were also initially developed outside AMD.AMDVLK was always a weird regression in the openness of the development model compared to that. Maybe understandable that the bean counters wanted to share the effort between the Windows and AMD drivers but throwing away the community aspect in order to achieve that made that approach doomed from the start IMO. The initial release being incredibly late (even though Vulkan was modeled after AMD&#x27;s own Mantle) was the cherry on top that allowed RADV to secure the winning seat but probably only accelerated the inevitable.

They already work on radv, which is already the better vulkan driver.This is a matter of AMD no longer wasting time on a pointless duplicate project no-one is really interested in. They can allocate more resources for amdgpu and radv and ultimately do less overall by getting rid of the redundant project.Win-win.

What level of support will they give RADV? Or is it just that AMD ultimately do less?

It is dangerous for RADV which already has its own issues. And when you look at AMDVLK, you don&#x27;t want those devs anywhere near RADV.

<pre><code> AMD is unifying its Linux Vulkan driver strategy and has decided to discontinue the AMDVLK open-source project, throwing our full support behind the RADV driver as the officially supported open-source Vulkan driver for Radeon™ graphics adapters.
</code></pre>
Scary title but good news in the end I think.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;AMDVLK-Discontinued" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;AMDVLK-Discontinued</a>&gt; This is a good but long overdue decision by AMD. RADV has long been more popular with gamers&#x2F;enthusiasts on Linux than their own official driver. Thanks to Valve, Google, Red Hat, and others, RADV has evolved very nicely.

I always think just open sourcing the whole software stack for graphics cards would be an excellent thing for hardware manufacturers, in the end these are free pieces of software and I&#x27;ve certain there would be a big community contributing loads of cool things for free. AMD (say) would also sell a load more hardware as enthusiast features would be added by the community.Maybe I&#x27;m just naive but the downsides of doing this seem absolutely minimal and the upsides quite large.

The kernel level of the stack was already open though, this only changes the Vulkan front end which AFAIK is irrelevant to ROCm.

Depending on what you want to do, you already can.llama.cpp and other inference servers work fine on the kernel driver.

This is great news for RADV development, I&#x27;m hoping someday we can even use ROCm on the open source stack.

The windows driver has 2 paths, the internal compiler, and the same LLVM as in the open source amdvlk release (though there might be things like not-yet-upstreamed changes, experimental new hardware support etc. that differ from the public version, it was fundamentally the same codebase). The same for DX12 (and any other driver that might use their PAL layer). If you want to confirm you can see all the llvm symbols in the driver&#x27;s amdvlk{32,64}.dll and amdxc{32,64}.dll files. From what I remember, the internal compiler path is just stripped out for the open source amdvlk releases.I believe the intent was to slowly deprecate the internal closed compiler, and leave it more as a fallback for older hardware, with most new development happening on LLVM. Though my info is a few months out of date now, I&#x27;d be surprised if the trajectory changed that quickly.

Why are they using different compilers?

No, it was a third driver.Per AMD&gt;Notably, AMD&#x27;s closed-source Vulkan driver currently uses a different pipeline compiler, which is the major difference between AMD&#x27;s open-source and closed-source Vulkan drivers.

What will AMD do with Windows Vulkan driver, didn&#x27;t they use amdvlk there? There was some radv on Windows experiment, it would be cool if AMD would use that.

AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan project is discontinued