Collabora is working on an experimental Windows port of RADV, Mesa’s open-source Vulkan driver for AMD graphics hardware, with Valve sponsoring the latest phase as the effort has reached a milestone, with Counter-Strike 2 now able to launch on Windows using RADV.
RADV has become the de facto Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs on Linux, where it forms a key part of the Mesa graphics stack. Windows users, however, still rely on AMD’s proprietary graphics driver, making the possibility of running RADV natively on the platform particularly significant.
The project builds on earlier work by graphics developer Faith Ekstrand, who demonstrated at XDC 2024 that RADV could communicate with AMD’s proprietary Windows kernel-mode driver through the Windows Display Driver Model 2 interface.
Her initial implementation reverse-engineered enough of the private communication between AMD’s user-space and kernel drivers to allocate memory, create queues, submit commands, and render a basic 3D scene.
Collabora has expanded that PoC into a more capable native Windows implementation. The new work removes the dependency on WSL, reduces hard-coded hardware assumptions, improves command-stream handling and synchronization, and adds support for sparse bindings, tessellation, task shaders, and dynamic GPU capability detection.
Although the driver does not yet pass the full Vulkan conformance test suite, its success rate has improved considerably. More importantly, the port can launch Counter-Strike 2 by starting the game with the -vulkan command-line argument.
However, that achievement does not mean RADV is ready to replace AMD’s official Windows Vulkan driver. The current implementation remains experimental, and several major technical obstacles must be addressed before it could become stable enough for general use.
Collabora says that a production-ready implementation would require either a stable and documented interface to AMD’s kernel driver or a compatibility library supplied by AMD that hides changes to the private communication format.
Presentation performance remains another unfinished area. RADV currently uses a slower CPU-based presentation path on Windows instead of native DXGI swapchains. Supporting DXGI properly would require importing images from D3D12. Achieving zero-copy presentation would need additional cooperation from AMD and probably Microsoft.
According to Collabora, zero-copy swaps could deliver performance improvements of up to three times in applications not limited by GPU processing power. However, that is still a future optimization rather than a capability of the current driver.
Despite these limitations, the project demonstrates that Mesa’s open-source AMD Vulkan driver can run beyond Linux and support genuine Windows gaming workloads.
The Windows RADV work is currently available in a development branch rather than Mesa’s main codebase, and Collabora has not announced a release schedule for an end-user driver. For now, it is still considered a technical experiment.
For additional details, see Collabora’s announcement.
