R600 Gallium3D Now Effectively At OpenGL 4.4, A Nudge Away From GL 4.5

[Nille_kungen]

Ahm...gma 500 Poulsbo

I still got a netbook with Poulsbo lying around somewhere.
Poulsbo is one of the worst supported hardware i have used, i think even via has better support.
Your post gives me chills and bad memories.

[airlied]

As i understand basically anything that can support GL 4.3 should be able to do Vulkan also.

The evergreen GPUs are missing virtual memory support without which doing Vulkan is a real painful process. Cayman has basic VM support, but it's a pretty small niche.

Dave.

[gsedej]

Trust me, even at GL3.3 the r600g driver is better than fglrx across the entire board. And then there's fglrx's completely shitty DDX driver, it -is- the worst DDX driver ever. Simply put, every r600 class card user should be using r600g.

Ahm...gma 500 Poulsbo

[AJenbo]

Great development... gives hope that pre-GCN users will be able to drop the dead Fglrx (which has been duct-tapped to work with modern kernels but not the latest X-servers) while retaining GL 4.5...at least cards with hardware 64-bit floating point execution cores. I wonder what is missing at the hardware level for a Vulkan driver to be written for pre-GCN Evergreen and Northern Islands GPUs?

As i understand basically anything that can support GL 4.3 should be able to do Vulkan also.

[duby229]

Great development... gives hope that pre-GCN users will be able to drop the dead Fglrx (which has been duct-tapped to work with modern kernels but not the latest X-servers) while retaining GL 4.5...at least cards with hardware 64-bit floating point execution cores. I wonder what is missing at the hardware level for a Vulkan driver to be written for pre-GCN Evergreen and Northern Islands GPUs?

Trust me, even at GL3.3 the r600g driver is better than fglrx across the entire board. And then there's fglrx's completely shitty DDX driver, it -is- the worst DDX driver ever. Simply put, every r600 class card user should be using r600g.

Vulkan has several subsets designed specifically for limited hardware, and r600 class cards can support one of those subsets... But those subsets were made for things like smart phones or infotainment systems and such. So I doubt very much it's worth the effort.

[nanonyme]

Great development... gives hope that pre-GCN users will be able to drop the dead Fglrx (which has been duct-tapped to work with modern kernels but not the latest X-servers) while retaining GL 4.5...at least cards with hardware 64-bit floating point execution cores. I wonder what is missing at the hardware level for a Vulkan driver to be written for pre-GCN Evergreen and Northern Islands GPUs?

Driver dev with way too much spare time

[Xaero_Vincent]

Great development... gives hope that pre-GCN users will be able to drop the dead Fglrx (which has been duct-tapped to work with modern kernels but not the latest X-servers) while retaining GL 4.5...at least cards with hardware 64-bit floating point execution cores. I wonder what is missing at the hardware level for a Vulkan driver to be written for pre-GCN Evergreen and Northern Islands GPUs?

[humbug]

Saw this earlier! Gives me hope for having 4.5 compatibility! I wonder if it would be possible to have Vulkan and 4.6 someday...

Both Vulkan drivers (Rad-V and AMDVLK) use the amdgpu kernel driver, which doesn't support pre-GCN graphics cards.

[pal666]

The end of the article explicitly states that won't happen.

i'm pretty sure the end of the article is wrong. spir-v support does not require vulkan support. spir-v extension is there to allow distribution of binary shaders

[schmidtbag]

Saw this earlier! Gives me hope for having 4.5 compatibility! I wonder if it would be possible to have Vulkan and 4.6 someday...

The end of the article explicitly states that won't happen. But, I suppose it could happen with the help of software rasterizers.