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

[ermo]

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.

(emphasis mine)

Is this for real? Because if so, wow.

Thank you!

[pal666]

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.

you can bet linux will work even better and will support better cards

[Guest]

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.

I have an HD6290 on an AMD C-60, hopefully it can improve GPU performance on it.......

[Guest]

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.

Awesome, thanks for your work on this!

[Aryma]

why didnt intel give some love to 7gen GPU like AMD did to some old GPU

[eydee]

Still stuck at OGL3, even though that's not what is written on its box. Considering that now AMD is the one controlling the AMD part of Mesa, this may even qualify as false advertising.

[JigglypuffSexDoll]

why didnt intel give some love to 7gen GPU like AMD did to some old GPU

i965 already supports GL 4.2 on IVB and 4.5 on HSW and is like two stupid extensions short of having GL 4.6 on both, so WTF do you think is wrong with this situation? So whiny.

And it wasn't AMD "giving some love" to old cards. It was a nice guy at Collabora.

[ShFil]

Imho gallium nine provided by NIR is more important for older cards than Vulkan. Gen7 is quite powerful, but limited by driver. (No Gallium Nine, no full Vulkan support.)

I remember that for playing Fallout New Vegas hd3000 (gen6) is enough on windows.

[ermo]

you can bet linux will work even better and will support better cards

I am not disputing that.

I run FreeBSD on a toy box to get a better feel for how "traditional unix" works and in that setting, using an older card which is well supported makes sense to me. As an aside, FreeBSD 12.x uses a Linux-4.16-era LinuxKPI DRM compatibility layer by default (you can override it if you want, but I'd rather not go too far off the beaten path with this).

My other more performant boxes run Linux w/AMD CPUs & AMD GCN GPUs where the r600g NIR work is not relevant.

[Mez']

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

And Turks.