Rewritten R600g NIR Backend Merged For Mesa 22.2 - Improves Radeon HD 5000/6000 Series

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Rewritten R600g NIR Backend Merged For Mesa 22.2 - Improves Radeon HD 5000/6000 Series

The rewritten NIR back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver with a focus on improving performance for old Radeon HD 5000/6000 series hardware has been merged! This also allows proper FP64 usage finally for the Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" series graphics cards...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=R600g-NIR-Rewrite-Lands

[boxie]

I think this would be somewhat amazing to see

[Draget]

There is a huge amount of slightly older PCs out there with 'good enough' Hardware where Windows 10/11 might not be the best choice and anything upcoming simply won't run. Instead of being landfill, those PCs could happily serve different people to surf the internet, read mails, news, video-chat with relatives etc.

Thanks to the devs for keeping old (but still usable) hardware alive!

[gerddie]

Regarding the R600/R700 class hardware: Currently assembler instructions are emitted that are not supported by this hardware, and they are rather basic, so that most application would simply crash if one would enable NIR for these cards.

[Dukenukemx]

There is a huge amount of slightly older PCs out there with 'good enough' Hardware where Windows 10/11 might not be the best choice and anything upcoming simply won't run. Instead of being landfill, those PCs could happily serve different people to surf the internet, read mails, news, video-chat with relatives etc.

Thanks to the devs for keeping old (but still usable) hardware alive!

I don't think Windows 11 would even install on those systems, and yes it's good enough for some people.

[woojoo]

I still have a 6950 collecting dust that has a firmware unlock to a 6970. Maybe its really the time to give it its last ride and let it run the whole test-suit

[Veerappan]

Our Media Center PC at home is still running mythtv on a 3-core Llano with a 6900-level APU, so I'll actually get some use out of the rewritten NIR backend.

Thanks!

[Veerappan]

Thinking further, R600 may have been the only remaining TGSI-only chip that clover attempted to support. Wonder if having a NIR backend might make it easier/possible to port the new NIR-based CL runtime over to these chips. My spare dev box still has a 6850 (Bart's) installed, so maybe we'll be about to find out.

[_ReD_]

I don't think Windows 11 would even install on those systems, and yes it's good enough for some people.

Certainly good enough for more than it should, considering the price of new graphics cards. :-/

[Adarion]

Nice! I still got several chips of that generation around, some onboard (though pre HD5xxx/6xxx), most dGPUs. That should do them a good service. Kudos!