For those who -like me- don't know much about what this means, here goes a summary:<p>There are basically two ways to program graphics on linux: OpenGL and Vulkan. OpenGL is older and more high-level, while Vulkan is newer and lower level, which should let programmers extract the most out of your hardware (at a development cost).<p>On the OpenGL front AMD open sourced and pushed for their RadeonSI driver. It works fine, although some say that its performance is somewhat worse than the (closed source) nvidia drivers.<p>On the Vulkan front, two years ago AMD promised to open source their driver some day. They've now announced that the source release is imminent. However, this is a driver they've developed to share as much as possible between windows and linux, and hence it doesn't "play along" with the linux-specific inter-driver sharing efforts (Mesa [1]).<p>Due to the long-shot promise, one guy developed RADV: a Vulkan driver that builds on Mesa. The advantage of this driver is that since it's always been open source and plays well with the linux driver-sharing efforts, it's been packaged on most distros and is really easy to use. The disadvantge is that its performance is lackluster. RADV's author has stated that he will continue to work on it despite AMD finally open-sourcing their Vulkan driver. People hope that having access to the AMD Vulkan driver will allow RADV to reap some optimitzations from it.<p>At this point you are ready to check the very recent benchmarks to see how performance compares between opengl/vulkan and radv/amd's vulkan driver [2]. TL/DR: NVidia propietary driver > RadeonSI OpenGL > AMD's Vulkan > RADV. I don't know how they compare drivers' performance between NVidia and AMD, but this seems to be the sentiment.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_%28computer_graphics%29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_%28computer_graphics%29</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amdgpu-1750-open&num=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amdgpu-1...</a>
My rant on my frustrations with the NVidia Linux drivers obviously struck a nerve a few days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877262" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877262</a><p>Between ROCm and GPUOpen, the AMD software team really seems to be setting themselves up for success. If their hardware team hits a home run or Nvidia makes a misstep, perhaps we could see a significant shift in market share.
The only downside I see to this is that the Vulkan space for AMD will leave OpenGL development in the dust. The OpenGL drivers for AMD cards have been sub par on Windows and Linux for a long time. This doesn't matter much for AAA games but smaller games and most non-game applications don't need and shouldn't want to use Vulkan.<p>That said as someone who does a bunch of Vulkan development on AMD platforms on Linux I'm really excited. There's nothing bad with some healthy competition.