Cracking Windows Open: Porting RADV to Win32
17 hours ago
- RADV is the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs, now the de facto Vulkan driver on Linux after AMD discontinued its proprietary alternative.
- Porting RADV to Windows would enable a shared codebase across platforms, easier debugging, faster fixes, and community contributions benefiting all users.
- Faith Ekstrand's initial work proved feasibility by reverse-engineering the WDDM2 interface, getting a 3D model to display, but with limitations.
- This project improved flexibility, portability, and stability, achieving support for games like Counter-Strike 2, though not yet conformant.
- Challenges included hardware generation differences, MSVC compiler incompatibilities, and opaque vendor-specific data in D3DKMT calls.
- The biggest hurdle is the proprietary kernel driver interface, which relies on fragile reverse-engineered structures with no backward-compatibility guarantee.
- Remaining work includes improving presentation via DXGI swapchains for better performance, potentially requiring AMD and Microsoft involvement.
- The project is sponsored by Valve and aims to motivate collaboration toward a stable open-source Vulkan driver on Windows.