Valve is sponsoring Collabora engineers in an exploratory effort to bring the open-source RADV Vulkan driver to Microsoft Windows. This driver is crucial for Linux gamers and has been instrumental to the success of the AMD-powered Steam Deck and Steam Machines.

Several developers funded by Valve are already working on the open-source RADV Vulkan driver and other Linux graphics components. The current initiative focuses on enabling RADV on Windows by integrating with the Windows WDDM2 driver model. A significant challenge is the dependency on AMD's proprietary Radeon Software Windows kernel driver, as porting the Linux AMDGPU kernel driver to Windows is outside the scope of this project.

This work involves reverse engineering AMD's Windows kernel driver to adapt RADV. For successful implementation, a stable interface to the AMD kernel driver is needed, or a shim library to manage undocumented changes between driver releases. Initial success has been demonstrated with a demo of Counter-Strike 2 running on RADV for Windows.