Vulkan on AMD Graphics Cards

Entry posted by Josh in Articles · July 6, 2021

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I have procrastinated testing of our new 3D engine on AMD hardware for a while. I knew it was not working as-is, but I was not too concerned. One of the promises of Vulkan is better support across-the-board and fewer driver bugs, due to the more explicit nature of the API. So when I finally tried out the engine on an R9 200 series card, what would actually happen? Would the promise of Vulkan be realized, or would developers continue to be plagued by problems on different graphics cards? Read on to find out how Vulkan runs on AMD graphics cards.

To test how Vulkan on AMD graphics cards, the first thing I had to do was run the new engine on a machine with an AMD graphics card. I removed the Nvidia card from my PC tower and inserted an AMD R9 200 series graphics card into the PCI-E slot of the motherboard. Then I turned on the computer's power by pressing the power button and powering up my computer with an AMD graphics card. What would happen? Would the AMD graphics card run Vulkan successfully?

The first error I encountered while running the new 3D engine with Vulkan on an AMD graphics card was that the shadowmap texture format had been explicitly declared as depth-24 / stencil 8, and it should have checked the supported formats to find a depth format the AMD graphics card supported for Vulkan. That was easily fixed.

The second issue was that my push constants structure was too big. There is a minimum limit of 128 bytes for the push constants structure in Vulkan 1.1 and 1.2. I never encountered this limit before, but on the AMD graphics card it was 128. I was able to eliminate an unneeded vec4 value to bring the structure size down to 128 bytes from 144 bytes.

With these issues fixed, the new engine with Vulkan ran perfectly on my AMD graphics card. The engine also works without a hitch on Intel graphics, with the exception that the number of shader image units seems to be a hardware-limited feature on those chipsets. We've also seen very reliable performance on Intel chips, although the number of shader image units is severely restricted on that hardware. Overall it appears the promise of fewer driver bugs under Vulkan is holding true, although there is very wide variability in the hardware capabilities that requires rendering fallbacks.