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Could be, but it will require some heavy investment from the FOSS community first.

In general, drivers written by vendors have poor quality (tons of legacy code + the usual enterprise shenanigans) but benefit from having access to all documents and all silicon erratas.

If the community can get past that, I firmly believe that adding a couple of thousand fresh eyes will eventually lead to significantly improved performance.



edit on reflection, my information is both based on vague memories and outdated, I shouldn't have made this post.


??? I don't believe this was the case for RADV. AMD was dragging their feet on providing an open source Vulkan driver so the community created one in record time.


I do remember reading they were dragging their feet on releasing some newer documents but I also thought their team had primarily moved to the open source driver. I may be wrong, I'm a complete outsider who hasn't been paying attention for a year or two.


They have moved to the open source driver for openGL. Vulcan was delayed for long enough that a RedHat employee built a driver and mainlined it( using the documentation provided for the openGL driver). Eventually AMD ended up supporting that driver instead of open sourcing the proprietary one that was part of their proprietary stack.


Note that ARM, Nvidia and AMD consider newer architecture as trade secrets and make it really hard to access to certain information.

Some of the current open drivers are really watered down.




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