Valve funds Windows port of AMD's open-source RADV Vulkan driver

Collabora announced it's porting AMD's RADV driver to Windows, funded by Valve. RADV is the default Vulkan driver on most AMD-powered Linux systems — it's part of the Mesa 3D graphics library and has been tuned for years to run Vulkan games fast.

Windows has never had an open-source GPU driver from any vendor. AMD's official Windows driver (Adrenalin) is closed-source. RADV on Windows changes that. The port is in its first phase, according to Collabora's blog post. No timeline yet for when it ships or whether it'll match Adrenalin's performance out of the gate.

This matters if you're running an AMD card and want more control over driver behavior, or if you've ever hit a driver bug AMD took months to patch. Open-source drivers get community fixes faster. RADV's Linux track record is solid — it often beats AMD's proprietary driver in specific Vulkan workloads. Whether that carries over to Windows depends on how much low-level Windows quirks slow it down.

Valve's interest is obvious: they want the Steam Deck's software stack (Linux + Mesa + RADV) to work the same way on Windows handhelds. If RADV on Windows ends up shipping in SteamOS for Windows or gets bundled with Steam, that's a big deal for anyone running an AMD-based handheld PC.

Check your current Vulkan performance on BetterFPS and see if your AMD rig is already hitting the targets before you wait for a driver swap.