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RADV Vulkan Driver Lands BFloat16 Support In Mesa 25.2


Introduced at the end of March was Vulkan 1.4.311 with VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for allowing BFloat16 'BF16' operations within SPIR-V shaders with SPV_KHR_bfloat16

This BFloat16 support can be beneficial for Vulkan machine learning / AI workloads and other use cases moving forward. Georg Lehmann who worked on this VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver noted though that AMD RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics processors have precision issues with BF16 and thus not enabled for now. So far AMDVLK as AMD's official open-source Vulkan API driver for Linux systems isn't yet exposing this BFloat16 extension.

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