The card in question: Thames [Radeon HD 7550M/7570M/7650M] (Radeon HD 7570M) I am starting to face mounting issues as a lot of modern software have started to abandon OpenGL in favor of Vulkan, and if its possible, I just want to try for the learning opportunity
The rationale for doing this must only be for fun. You’re talking about a project that will take man years, and the price of a new vulkan capable graphics card is $300-400.
You don’t need to spend that much to get a vulkan-capable GPU.
the price of a new vulkan capable graphics card is $300-400
Do you think I would have any motivation to embark on such a ( admittedly Useless)project if i had that kind of money lying around to spend on a GPU.
The time it will take you to learn the required skills to build a GPU driver and then the implementation will likely be several years—maybe half a decade.
Fair enough, I just want to keep my Hardware running, do i have any options(besides getting new hardware).
Looking at the Product Conformance pages, it looks like you need a GCN 1.0 device for Vulkan 1.0 support (current is 1.4).
Thames was a Terrascale 2 architecture (i.e. the one before GCN1.0) and as such can’t support Vulkan or DX12.
You can get a modern card capable of vulkan for like $30 off ebay.
my entire laptop is cheaper than that and mostly supports vulkan
Someone started working on a Vulkan driver for TeraScale GPUs a few years ago:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/Triang3l/mesa/-/tree/Terakan
I believe it can run some demos add even works on windows.
Hey man, I don’t want to discourage you, but this is one of those things where if you have to ask how to do something you’re probably not experienced enough to do it. That being said, as a learning opportunity even if you don’t make it far you’ll still learn a lot about how GPUs work.
I’d start by looking at any existing drivers you can find and see if you can document or find documentation for the commands fed to the GPU. From there you can look at the Mesa project for examples of converting Vulkan to instructions for specific processors and see if you can get it to all fit together for your project.
I am willing to begin from scratch, any proper resources you can point me to? l
That is a tall order, shorter perhaps than writing an opengl driver
Vulkan is incredibly verbose and well documented, have you looked at the spec?
I found this, apparently “Triang3l” a Xenia emu dev, developed the Vulkan Terakan driver which adds support for HD 7 series. Last commit was in 2023 apparently. I couldn’t find anything else yet.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/Triang3l/mesa/-/commits/dcc26f1df0b464c5bc1a5a5992edd9607381bb4f
Would something like this work for you ?
That’s the other way around. It’s an OpenGL driver that uses Vulkan under the hood. OP would need the opposite to have Vulkan on his card, but I don’t think it’s possible given that Vulkan is a lower-level API compared to OpenGL.
that looks like something opposite to what i want Vulkan -> OpenGl, instead of something like OpenGl -> Vulkan
How about this?
