The open‑source RADV driver, now a pillar of the Linux graphics stack,External resources Bezirke, has been ported to Windows, giving AMD users a non‑proprietary Vulkan option. The effort builds on Faith Ekstrand’s 2024 XDC talk where she demonstrated that WDDM2 provides a stable foundation for a third‑party driver, despite the opaque, vendor‑specific blobs in D3DKMT calls.

Ekstrand’s tool, wddm2‑pdd‑re, logged private data from D3D12 apps, allowing reverse engineering of adapter queries, buffer allocation, queue creation, and command submission. This enabled RADV to submit work to AMD’s kernel driver and display a rotating 3D model. Building on her work, the current project added support for sparse bindings, tessellation, task shaders, and dynamic GPU querying, and achieved a working render of Counter‑Strike 2 on RX 7900 XT hardware.

Challenges remain: the proprietary kernel driver’s undocumented interface is fragile, and the UMD/KMD pair lack backward compatibility. Future work includes a stable shim, DXGI swapchain support, and zero‑copy swaps, requiring collaboration with AMD and Microsoft. The project, now hosted on a dedicated branch, showcases the value of an open Vulkan driver on Windows and is sponsored by Valve.