Vulkan on an amd Integrated Gpu

[robin0800]

Found out Three packages are needed

1. amdvlk provides driver for vulkan
2. vulkan-tools provides info to system you have vulkan and provides vulkaninfo --summary
3. vulkan-messa-layers Provides layers info to vulkan

[cscs]

Hi,

Sorry, but I must point out this is incorrect according to the documentation.

@robin0800

Found out Three packages are needed

There are 3 different ways of getting different vulkan drivers.

To quote the archwiki (vulkan page):

AMD: there are three implementations, which could be installed simultaneously:

• vulkan-radeon (or lib32-vulkan-radeon) - RADV (part of Mesa project)
• amdvlk (or lib32-amdvlk) - AMDVLK Open (maintained by AMD)
• vulkan-amdgpu-proAUR (or lib32-vulkan-amdgpu-proAUR) - AMDVLK Closed (maintained by AMD)

In general I would recommend users only use the first option as provided by/through the mesa project.

And I would warn especially against the closed-source option, as this is very rarely actually desirable. That is a larger subject unnecessary to go into here.

For additional components, especially in the case of development then

For Vulkan application development, install vulkan-headers, and optionally vulkan-validation-layers, vulkan-man-pagesAUR and vulkan-tools (you can find the vulkaninfo tool in here).

To summarize.

@robin0800

Three packages are needed

1. amdvlk provides driver for vulkan
2. vulkan-tools provides info to system you have vulkan and provides vulkaninfo --summary
3. vulkan-messa-layers Provides layers info to vulkan

1. Unneeded and possibly disruptive
2. Likely only needed for development purposes, though it is a dependency of certain tools and an optional dep for inxi.
3. This is a possibly useful package but not required.

The real driver for vulkan on amd is one you did not list - vulkan-radeon.
Anything else is extra or should be avoided.

To quote the archwiki again (amd page):

For Vulkan support:

• Test with only vulkan-radeon first: although not appearing as the first provider of vulkan-driver (due to its alphabetical order), it avoids some issues that have repeatedly been reported about amdvlk.
• When the amdvlk package is installed, it sets itself as the default Vulkan driver: see Vulkan#Selecting via environment variable if you need to have both drivers installed (e.g. when having issues with vulkan-radeon).
• Optionally, for 32-bit application support, install the lib32-vulkan-radeon or lib32-amdvlk package to match the native package installed.

[robin0800]

With the vulkan-radeon driver the VK_LAYER_AMD_switchable_graphics_64 AMD switchable graphics layer 1.3.295 version 1 is missing.

[cscs]

???

Switchable graphics is only a desirable variable when … wanting to use or disable switching between the providers.

For example, if you have amdvlk installed, and because it forces itself as the default, you may wish to set DISABLE_LAYER_AMD_SWITCHABLE_GRAPHICS_1=1.

In the case of a single provider I dont know why you would need or want any switchable graphics variable.

That said … if for whatever reason you do need more than what vulkan-radeon provides then you can very well install more and make use of it.

This is again described more in-depth at the archwiki page:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Vulkan#Switching

[robin0800]

Ended up with 1.vulkan-radeon, 2.vulkan-mesa-layers an optional dependency of 1. and 3.vulkan-tools as suggested by Arch Linux Vulkan Wiki.

Well having re-read the Vulkan Arch Wiki
it refers to vulkan-tools as needed for vulkaninfo.
As said before vulkan-mesa-layers is an optional dependency of vulkan-radeon.