Rewritten NIR Code For Old Radeon "R600" Linux Driver Improves Performance In 2022

[Motolav]

A Vulkan driver is possible, but would be tedious and would require someone with the dedication and interest to step up to make it happen.

A 6990 with a rewritten Mesa driver, rewritten OpenCL driver, and a fresh Vulkan driver would be beautiful.

IIRC a Vulkan driver for Terascale GPUs is not possible because they don't support virtual memory, a required feature for Vulkan. It was something related to how GCN handles memory that Terascale doesn't

[s_j_newbury]

Hmmm OK. I thought it was more like PlayOnLinux that provides viable configs for the different games, but for those shipped by Steam.

It's more like an "LTS" version of WINE which receives fixes/hacks to make games work in the Steam library and has various improvements to better integrate with Steam, such as for input support.

[sinepgib]

When people refer to Proton, they're generally referring to DXVK on top of it, even if they aren't specifically calling it out.

Hmmm OK. I thought it was more like PlayOnLinux that provides viable configs for the different games, but for those shipped by Steam.

[smitty3268]

Why is people still answering me about Vulkan drivers? My question was about Proton requiring GCN, I think that's pretty clear. Proton can work without Vulkan (as the first person to answer confirmed), just obviously Vulkan games won't run. So Proton can also run without GCN, as I expected.

When people refer to Proton, they're generally referring to DXVK on top of it, even if they aren't specifically calling it out.

[s_j_newbury]

Why is people still answering me about Vulkan drivers? My question was about Proton requiring GCN, I think that's pretty clear. Proton can work without Vulkan (as the first person to answer confirmed), just obviously Vulkan games won't run. So Proton can also run without GCN, as I expected.

Yes, Proton will work, but obviously no DXVK or VKD3D etc which does really limit the utility since WineD3D is very much slower, and will probably be even more so on an r600. You could use a custom version of Proton with Gallium-Nine support added as mentioned above, that will work fine with r600g, which will at least allow older titles to work well. Also OpenGL titles will still work, but most Windows games are D3D.

[sinepgib]

A Vulkan driver is possible, but would be tedious and would require someone with the dedication and interest to step up to make it happen.

A 6990 with a rewritten Mesa driver, rewritten OpenCL driver, and a fresh Vulkan driver would be beautiful.

Why is people still answering me about Vulkan drivers? My question was about Proton requiring GCN, I think that's pretty clear. Proton can work without Vulkan (as the first person to answer confirmed), just obviously Vulkan games won't run. So Proton can also run without GCN, as I expected.

[Eirikr1848]

Isn't Proton just an improved WINE? Does it really need GCN?

A Vulkan driver is possible, but would be tedious and would require someone with the dedication and interest to step up to make it happen.

A 6990 with a rewritten Mesa driver, rewritten OpenCL driver, and a fresh Vulkan driver would be beautiful.

[DanL]

I may have to give this a spin on our HTPC, which is still running a Llano 3-core CPU.
I had honestly figure on that machine riding off into the sunset with it's current driver stack.

Why would better 3D performance affect the life of an HTPC?

[Cryio]

With HD 5000 and HD 6000 being DX11 (11_0) compliant GPUs, that also means they support OpenGL 4.6 on Linux, right?

[Veerappan]

I may have to give this a spin on our HTPC, which is still running a Llano 3-core CPU.

I had honestly figure on that machine riding off into the sunset with it's current driver stack.