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Cracking Windows Open: Porting RADV to WIN32
RADV, Mesa's open source Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs, is being ported to Windows. Building on Faith Ekstrand's XDC 2024 feasibility work, Collabora (sponsored by Valve) has improved command stream handling, synchronization, and hardware support, and successfully ran Counter-Strike 2 using the driver. Key challenges include reverse-engineering AMD's private WDDM2 kernel driver interface, MSVC compiler incompatibilities with Mesa's codebase, and generation-specific GPU architecture differences. The port remains experimental and non-conformant. The biggest blocker to production readiness is the fragile reliance on reverse-engineered private data structures between the user-mode and kernel-mode drivers — requiring either AMD to document the interface, open-source the KMD, or provide a stable ABI. Presentation performance also needs work, with DXGI swapchain support and zero-copy swaps as future goals.
Source: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/cracking-windows-open-porting-radv-to-win32.html. 8sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
