Descriptor Heap support in mesa vulkan drivers

Vulkan
1

I tried to run the siggraph2026_vk_tutorial and got the following:

Selecting Vulkan physical devices failed: no_suitable_device
 - Physical Device AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV RENOIR) not selected due to: Device extension VK_EXT_descriptor_heap not supported
 - Physical Device llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.7, 256 bits) not selected due to: Device extension VK_EXT_descriptor_heap not supported

It looks like descriptor heap has limited support. Since descriptor heap seems like an api change that should at most require vulkan driver support and not have any hardware requirements, that is to say any old gpu should support descriptor heap provided desriptor heap is supported in the vulkan driver.

At first, this post was looking for help but after writing the above, I looked into the mesa vulkan drivers and found the reqirement to define the environmental variable RADV_EXPERIMENTAL=heap. Once defined, it ran successfully. I also tested the descriptor heap sample in Vuklan-Samples and that worked as well. I am running with mesa-vukan-drivers 26.1.6.1 of debian/trixie stable-backports.

I posted this anyway for those who run into the same problem.

2

Thanks for sharing the workaround, that’s useful for anyone testing the SIGGRAPH tutorial on Mesa. The `RADV_EXPERIMENTAL=heap` variable is easy to miss, so mentioning it here can save others some troubleshooting. Good to know the Vulkan-Samples descriptor heap example also worked after enabling it. I’ll keep this in mind when testing descriptor heap support on older AMD setups.