The open-source developers at Georgia Tech working on Vortex as an OpenCL-compatible RISC-V GPGPU implementation are out with their next major release for this open-source GPU design.

Vortex continues to consist of an open-source simulator or RTL simulator and can also be used with either AMD-Xilinx or Altera FPGAs too for this RISC-V GPU design. With Vortex 3.0 they have introduced a fixed-function graphics stack complete with a rasterizer and texture units and more in providing a 3D pipeline for expanding their scope beyond just GPGPU compute. Vortex 3.0 also adds tensor core structured sparsity, warp group-level matrix multiplication, a new hardware kernel scheduler, a command processor architecture, async barriers, and a variety of other new capabilities.

Vortex 3.0 also adds a Mesa/Lavapipe Vulkan back-end as well as HIP support via chipStar. The new Mesa driver is called vortexpipe.

Those wanting to learn more about the many improvements and new features in the Vortex 3.0 open-source RISC-V GPU design can find it on GitHub . The project site continues to be hosted by Georgia Tech's College of Computing.