AMDVLK has been discontinued as AMD are throwing their "full support" behind RADV

By Liam Dawe - 15 Sep 2025 at 7:09 pm UTC

Last updated: 15 Sep 2025 at 7:19 pm UTC

AMD have announced the end of AMDVLK, their official open-source Vulkan driver and will instead now be focusing on the much more popular RADV.

Most people gaming on Linux will likely be using RADV anyway, since Mesa comes as pretty much the standard on Linux distributions and has Valve's backing too with it being the graphics driver used on SteamOS.

On the official AMDVLK GitHub, an announcement was posted by AMD's JianRong JIN:

In a move to streamline development and strengthen our commitment to the open-source community, 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.

This consolidation allows us to focus our resources on a single, high-performance codebase that benefits from the incredible work of the entire open-source community. We invite developers and users alike to utilize the RADV driver and contribute to its future.

Learn more about RADV: Mesa RADV Documentation

Contribute to the code: Mesa GitLab Repository

We are excited about this focused path forward and are committed to the continued success of open-source Vulkan on Radeon.

As a result they've also archived the GitHub page for PAL (Platform Abstraction Library), the GitHub for their GPU Ray Tracing Library and others related.

I'm quite excited by their mention of throwing their "full support" at RADV, which will hopefully mean actually providing some resources for the Mesa driver to improve.

What do you make of this news?

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: AMD, Drivers, Misc, Open Source

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About the author - Liam Dawe

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7 comments

melkemind 3 hours ago

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I should be shocked that it took them so long, but I'm not. Also, it'll be interesting to see what "full support" really means. So much happens behind the scenes. I wonder if Valve played any part in this, especially with all their new rumored hardware on the horizon.

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walther von stolzing 3 hours ago

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So hopefully Arch won't offer to install amdvlk by default now, because alphabetically it comes before vulkan-radeon?

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Taros 3 hours ago

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First I was shocked that AMD discontinues something open-source related.

Then I read the news. Now I am relieved. ^^

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_Mars 2 hours ago

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So, surely this means AMD will help with the performance gap regarding raytracing, riiight?

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omer666 2 hours ago

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@_Mars in my experience, that's already done.
Playing Doom The Dark Ages on mesa 25.0 was a slideshow on the 3rd level and required me to install amdvlk, but when mesa 25.1 showed up in Fedora repositories, performance was on par with amdvlk - and that's using an RX 6600. I wonder if mesa 25.2 improves this even further, but I guess we'll get the answer when Fedora 43 hits our SSDs emoji

Last edited by omer666 on 15 Sep 2025 at 8:59 pm UTC

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Stella 1 hour ago

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This is good news. 99% of people I know didn't even bother with AMDVLK since Mesa is superior in most cases and it ships with most distros. But there's some issues I like to see resolved in Mesa, like bad RT performance and some overall performance jankiness in games, like traversal stutter in Indiana Jones GC.

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sonic2kk 53 minutes ago

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Never had any problem with RADV in the... Gosh, 9 years since? From all the way back with my beloved RX480. I still remember the "RADV is not a conformant Vulkan implementation: Here be dragons!" warning. How far we've come.

Great news in my opinion. I haven't noticed any ray tracing performance gap, but I'm also using a 7900XTX and avoid using raytracing on principle when I'm not checking "max settings" performance with a game.

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