Open-Source R600g Driver For Old AMD GPUs Is Seeing New Activity To Improve GPU Compute

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Open-Source R600g Driver For Old AMD GPUs Is Seeing New Activity To Improve GPU Compute

While AMD long ago stopped actively contributing to the open-source R600 Gallium3D driver on Linux systems for OpenGL on Radeon HD 2000 "R600" through Radeon HD 6000 "Northern Islands" graphics cards, thanks to a few open-source community developers this Mesa driver code continues seeing improvements even with the Radeon HD 6000 series already being more than one decade old. The latest on the R600g front are various efforts improving the GPU compute support...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=R600g-Better-Compute-2022

[schmidtbag]

It's a shame these GPUs didn't get much attention for OpenCL back when they were still relevant because when you could use them for that, they were fast.

[SkyWarrior]

It would be really nice if someone could also develop a vulkan driver for hd5000 and 6000 series high end cards.

[Anux]

I still got my HD 5770 in an old PC (that no one wanted even for free) up in the attic. Was the best price/TDP/performance card you could get back in the day and it served me nearly 8 years.
Am I becoming a bitcoin trillionaire soon?

@Michael: Hesa -> Mesa

[Guest]

It would be really nice if someone could also develop a vulkan driver for hd5000 and 6000 series high end cards.

I'd be interested in this! Ended up going back to a HD 6870 and it turns out I've been taking Vulkan support for granted

[Eirikr1848]

I'd be interested in this! Ended up going back to a HD 6870 and it turns out I've been taking Vulkan support for granted

Hopefully!

I remember reading quite a few years back that it could happen, but no one stepped up from AMD and GCN 1.0 was the cut-off point.

With VLIW4 having a lot of success with interfaces for OpenGL, I really do wonder what the likelihood of a successful lower-level API implantation like Vulkan would be.

(Apple chose also to avoid a Metal driver for these cards, wondering if there is a correlation)

[agd5f]

Hopefully!

I remember reading quite a few years back that it could happen, but no one stepped up from AMD and GCN 1.0 was the cut-off point.

With VLIW4 having a lot of success with interfaces for OpenGL, I really do wonder what the likelihood of a successful lower-level API implantation like Vulkan would be.

(Apple chose also to avoid a Metal driver for these cards, wondering if there is a correlation)

Pre-GFX6 hardware does not support GPU virtual memory and resource descriptors in memory. The lack of these hardware features makes it very difficult to write a Vulkan driver.

[Quackdoc]

Still waiting for rusticl to support radeonsi, I wonder if it could eventually support zink too? would be neato

[Dukenukemx]

Did they ever finish Soft FP64?

[Eirikr1848]

To quote an oft-used Reddit phrase…. “Sooo…. you are saying there is still a chance?!”

(In all seriousness thanks for that explanation. Guessing that’s why Apple just flat out dumped Metal support in 10.4 and higher?)

Pre-GFX6 hardware does not support GPU virtual memory and resource descriptors in memory. The lack of these hardware features makes it very difficult to write a Vulkan driver.