Radeon R600 Gallium3D Flips On OpenGL 4.5 For NIR Backend

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon R600 Gallium3D Flips On OpenGL 4.5 For NIR Backend

The experimental NIR back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver as an alternative to the default TGSI code-path has now enabled OpenGL 4.5 support for capable GPUs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=R600g-NIR-Enables-OpenGL-4.5

[tildearrow]

Are these cards incapable of Vulkan?

[smitty3268]

Are these cards incapable of Vulkan?

I think that depends on your definition of incapable. I think like some of the older Intel chips, they probably could hack something together with a bunch of effort and workarounds if they tried hard enough. They aren't easily capable though.

[oiaohm]

Are these cards incapable of Vulkan?

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/vulkan

Currently yes incapable of Vulkan. But still seeing old card still improving opengl support is good. Memory management in the old cards does not align with vulkan requirements. So its not impossible for those old card to-do vulkan but its unlikely to perform well due to lot of CPU processing to check memory rules. People ask why wine need to maintain a Opengl backend there are still a lot of people out there with GPUs that cannot do vulkan but do a good enough for light usages opengl.

[coder]

Thanks for this. Only a couple years ago I tried to run some OpenGL 4.3 code on a HD 6850. I still have the card, so it might see use again, in a mostly headless server.

It's always nice to have options, especially since my HD 7870 is sounding like an orbital sander, under heavy load.

[lorn10]

Really interesting discussion. That's at least as interesting as those "undocumented" rumors regarding the compatibility of Apples Metal API on later R600 hardware. For example, the following sentence can be found at Wikipedia's iMac Timeline article:

"AMD had developed a firmware upgrade that would allowed both graphic cards to support Metal and Mid-2010 iMac to be upgraded to latest macOS, but Apple had refused to certify them." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_(...:_Unibody_iMac)

I think regarding the Radeon HD 5000 range any low-level API support would be illusory but at least the later Radeon HD 6000 series could be capable to support at least some Vulkan functions. (Well yes, this doesn't would bring a lot because to use it meaningfully the entire API it has to be supported.)

[leipero]

...my HD 7870 is sounding like an orbital sander, under heavy load.

Haha, that's the most amusing description I saw recently .

[coder]

Haha, that's the most amusing description I saw recently .

I'm glad you enjoyed it, but I'm actually serious. It's a XFX, for what it's worth. GHz edition, which I'm sure doesn't help, although I didn't spring for the OC/Black/whatever version that had the upgraded cooler. I didn't think I'd mind the fans running a bit fast, but it didn't occur to me that they could be so badly balanced.

In spite of burning over 100 W more, my EVGA GTX 980 Ti FTW couldn't have been a more different experience. Even under the highest loads, it's well-mannered. And yet, like the HD 7870, it's also a 2-fan card!

Getting back to my HD 6850, it's only a single-fan card and also pretty quiet. I'm pretty sure it's a Sapphire brand.

[leipero]

coder Haha, yes, it really depends on the card brand and model really, I had HD 6770 that had a sound like a hair dryer from the late 90's, so I know your pain . When fan finally died, I simply strapped on 120mm relatively low RPM fan on it and undervolted the card as much as possible (I think 1.013v) in vBIOS and forgot about it .

[Dukenukemx]

So does that mean Soft fp64 support is enabled?