EXA Acceleration For The Old ATI Rage Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: EXA Acceleration For The Old ATI Rage Driver

If you happen to be an unfortunate soul still using an old ATI Rage graphics processor, the "R128" driver now has EXA acceleration support after about a decade and a half of the hardware being around...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA5Mzk

[Veerappan]

I like what I've been seeing recently. New support for KMS/EXA/etc being added for older hardware that was about to get permanently dropped from X or Mesa.

I'd definitely like to see someone re-add support for r100-r200 and 3dfx to mesa, and then transition some of old DRI1 drivers that were dropped over to DRI2.

Does anyone know if Gallium3D has been tested on non-X86 (32 and 64bit)? I've got a 3DFX Voodoo3 in my Alpha 21164 (PWS 500?) that I've been meaning to finish the Gentoo install on... It's a pile of archaic hardware, but still a project to work on...

[[Knuckles]]

I like what I've been seeing recently. New support for KMS/EXA/etc being added for older hardware that was about to get permanently dropped from X or Mesa.

I'd definitely like to see someone re-add support for r100-r200 and 3dfx to mesa, and then transition some of old DRI1 drivers that were dropped over to DRI2.

3D is not really worth it: I recently was playing with a R200 and many games, even those from the indie bundles (which are not very demanding) need this or that OpenGL extension to work. (World of Goo worked though. Very nice.)

For older cards, such as the rage series, you don't even have enough VRAM normally to have a decent resolution@32bpp and a 3d framebuffer.

On the other hand, having KMS, simple acceleration and Xv is awesome. I have a pile of ATI rages (still useful when you need a PCI graphics card that will work everywhere and with everything), and a big thanks goes to the X devs working on this.

[allquixotic]

Too bad you can't play Rage on an ATI Rage, that would be funny

Well you probably could at 800x600 with a Core i7 3970X, 2000 MHz quad-channel DDR3 and llvmpipe...

[DanL]

IIRC, the Rage chips was still found on server mobo's well into the 2000's.

[agd5f]

I'd definitely like to see someone re-add support for r100-r200 and 3dfx to mesa, and then transition some of old DRI1 drivers that were dropped over to DRI2.

r100/r200 support was never dropped from mesa. They support DRI2 just fine are still supported in mesa.

[curaga]

Yeah, go Rage

[DeepDayze]

I've got an old ATI R128 in my parts box so I might try this on one of my ancient boxes built that I play around with.

[Adarion]

Does anyone know if Gallium3D has been tested on non-X86 (32 and 64bit)? I've got a 3DFX Voodoo3 in my Alpha 21164 (PWS 500?) that I've been meaning to finish the Gentoo install on... It's a pile of archaic hardware, but still a project to work on...

I do not really know but:

http://packages.gentoo.org/package/media-libs/mesa

or

http://gentoo-portage.com/media-libs/mesa

seems to be on ~alpha and also e.g. on arm. Give ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~alpha" a try for the latest version.Try changing USE flags and maybe some CFLAGS if it fails the first time.

[Dukenukemx]

I like to see old hardware supported. Even though the hardware is severely dated, it's not like it's still not used. Better yet, this could breath new life into the hardware. Though the ATI rage chip is a bit extreme in age, there's lots of people who own Legacy hardware. Mostly cause nobody needs to upgrade. I still own my fair share of Windows XP machines with Voodoo 3 and Radeon 9700 graphic cards. Would love to switch them over to Linux so long as I can make good use of the hardware.