R600 Gallium3D Driver For Old Radeon GPUs To See Rewritten NIR Backend

[phoronix]

Phoronix: R600 Gallium3D Driver For Old Radeon GPUs To See Rewritten NIR Backend

While AMD's official graphics driver on Windows has effectively moved to legacy pre-Polaris graphics card support, in the open-source world on Linux even the old "R600" Gallium3D driver for Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics cards sees the occasional new feature work by the community. The latest is a new NIR back-end being rewritten for this R600g driver and should debut soon...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=R600g-New-NIR-Backend

[Eirikr1848]

Gert is amazing! I’m giving a 2008 iMac to the neighbors with Manjaro - will let them know Minecraft performance is set to improve later this year!! Whoo hoo!

(I’d gladly send him a few cards or laptops that use r300 to NIRify those as well! Minecraft for all! 😆)

[Raka555]

Makes me happy about buying that HD4670 back then. I still have it in a PC to this day.
4670-ultimate.jpg

[V1tol]

My parents are still rocking HD4290 integrated in 890G chipset. Although they are not playing games it is nice to have some performance boost in a world where every browser and messenger use hardware acceleration heavily.

[lorn10]

Eirikr1848
Exactly, this is really amazing. I also have some quite old (SSD upgraded) iMac computers which are running awesome nice on Linux! A quite useful hint is to set Linux up when ever possible in native EFI mode. This will give Linux the same "full and unlimited" access to the hardware as MacOS has. (Ergo avoid Boot camp when ever possible.)

And regard NIR on r300, they are already working on it. This is shown also by the number of open r300 MRs:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests?label_name%5B%5D=r300

Main reason is the project to replace "GLSL to TGSI" with "GLSL to NIR" and "NIR to TGSI", see MR !8044 (which is lead by Emma Anholt).

[ezst036]

This is excellent news. These cards are still very capable for many non-gaming use cases and those who have these cards paid good money for them and deserve to get the most out of their investment(s).

[Teggs]

I don't use any of these cards any more, but I appreciate that some people are working to set them up for long(er) term support.

[ermo]

2x HD3300 IGPs, 1x HD4250 IGP and HD4670, HD4850, HD5770 and HD6570 AIBs here -- all in working order and many of them in use still.

Looking forward to see how this r600 bit of development pans out.

[ms178]

I hope my 6700M-equipped Notebook lives long enough to see the fruits of this work.

[polarathene]

It'd be nice to see some other Gallium3D drivers get this porting effort too if it helps, like Virgl3D for 3D accel in QEMU/KVM virtual machines... which I guess might eventually be able to also leverage Zink? Not sure if that would make any TGSI to NIR portion of Virgl3D pointless though.

Getting capable/experienced talent to work on such is probably difficult without one having personal interest, but I'm not aware of anyway to setup a bounty for such and let any of those devs know about it.. but first the bounty would need to get large enough to warrant interest I guess