Today, March 18, 2016, AMD announced the release of a Beta driver for GNU/Linux operating system that incorporates support for the new, groundbreaking Vulkan 3D API.
The new drive has been named by AMD as AMD Radeon GPU-PRO and it is currently targeted at AMD R9 series of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), such as AMD Radeon R9 380X, AMD Radeon R9 380, AMD Radeon R9 285, AMD Radeon R9 M395X, AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, AMD Radeon R9 Fury, and AMD Radeon R9 Nano.
Being the first public Beta release and all that, the AMD Radeon GPU-PRO driver software has been made available only for the Ubuntu Linux platform. The package contains an installation script and Debian packages (.deb) for the Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system.
“This driver is intended as beta level support for use solely with Vulkan applications and as such some driver functionality has been removed. This is including, but not limited to, support for other Graphics APIs, Radeon Settings and other Radeon Software driver features,” said AMD in the release notes.
Highlights of the AMD Radeon GPU-PRO Beta driver
The driver currently supports the Vulkan 1.0, VDPAU, OpenGL 4.5, GLX 1.4, and OpenCL 1.2 APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), offers basic display and power management features, supports both the ADF (Atomic Display Framework) and KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) technologies, and includes a GPL-compliant kernel module.
You can download the AMD Radeon GPU-PRO Beta driver 16.15.1013 for Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS right now from the official announcement page (link above), but we don’t recommend users to install this driver for production use. Our suggestion is to first take a look a the long list of known limitations and issues before attempting to take this driver for a test drive.
Via Softpedia