Mesa's R600 Driver Nears Feature Complete NIR Support For Radeon HD 5000/6000 Series

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's R600 Driver Nears Feature Complete NIR Support For Radeon HD 5000/6000 Series

For those still making use of pre-GCN AMD graphics cards supported by the R600 Gallium3D driver (namely the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series), the open-source "R600g" Gallium3D driver now has nearly feature complete NIR support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=R600g-NIR-Nears-Feature-Comp

[ranixon]

Great news, I still with my HD 6870 becouse I can't buy one newer. And with the actual prices in Argentina is just impossible.

[ermo]

Nice. I've got an old PhII 1090T system (bare iron toy FreeBSD box w/8GiB DDR2 ECC memory) which will run a single-slot HP OEM HD6570 1GB DDR3 (salvaged from a box that was long since put out to pasture) which has decent idle power usage and supports DP for my dual DP setup behind a KVM. I repasted its tiny vapour chamber cooler with Arctic MX-4 and its tiny fan is now almost inaudible when I stress it to its max at ~50W.

The advantage of using such an old card is that the DRM compatibility layer on FreeBSD tends to lag behind the Linux state of the art, so I'm essentially betting that using an old card with a fresh Mesa stack will ensure that everything works as expected. It also supports WebRender and hardware video acceleration in FF and the 1090T still has some life left in it.

I also keep an old C2Q Q9400 system w/ 4GiB DDR3 RAM around, which will run a HD 5770 to be more-or-less period-accurate in terms of performance except for having an SSD. Looking at the various CPUs with iGPUs, it's clear that this system uses about 10x (if not more) the power compared to a similarly performant modern Atom-based quad core system, which is kind of crazy.

[xpris]

Any upcoming benchmarks?

[ResponseWriter]

Applicable to some of the first APUs, too. Perfectly fine if you don't need much more than a desktop and maybe basic games, although these days mine is running my NAS.

[ezst036]

Applicable to some of the first APUs, too.

Kaveri?

[woife]

But if you are still using such hardware, it may be time to consider an upgrade for the performance and power efficiency benefits as well as then being able to enjoy Vulkan support and other modern GPU features.

Nope.
I use my old laptop for some simple CAD/CAM in my workshop, and the hardware is still working fine. It's 9 years old now, and hope it works for another 5 years.
And because of that I'm glad that it is still supported and sees some updates now and then

[StandaSK]

Kaveri?

Kaveri uses GCN, thus using the amdgpu driver, not r600. The r600 driver applies to Llano, Trinity and Richland (and the Bobcat stuff).

[Adarion]

E-350 Brazos is one of the very early APUs that uses Evergreen. It was a very popular platform back in the days, even some boards saw Coreboot support. Some laptops also based on this platform. I have one still in use.
Glad to see these optimisations coming.
Besides, HD 5xxx/6xxx is still well supported and can have fairly okay idle power use, thus I still have some. E.g. my RX 590 is so fucked up I replaced it for the time with an old 5450 or something, and now my Zen+ setup works like a charm. There's always use for some old but well working GPU!

[gerddie]

A few additions to the article: On one hand, Michael, I think it would be fair to mention in the article that I'm with Collabora, because of their policy to allow R&D time most of this work is done on company time. On the other hand, thanks to the soft-fp64 lowering available in NIR the driver can now actually expose OpenGL 4.3 for these cards that don't support hardware fp64.