Mesa's Radeon R600g Driver Adds NIR Support For Pre-Evergreen GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's Radeon R600g Driver Adds NIR Support For Pre-Evergreen GPUs

Merged in early July to Mesa 22.2 was the rewritten R600g NIR back-end for improving older AMD Radeon HD 5000/6000 series graphics cards on Linux with this open-source OpenGL driver. That NIR code was limited to "newer" Radeon GPUs supported by the R600g driver while now it's been extended for supporting pre-Evergreen GPUs too...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/R600g-NIR-For-Older-GPUs

[IActuallyKnowItAll]

I had a 2600HD I had lying around before I gave to a family member recently. They probably aren't using it so I might be able to recover and test this change.

[kpedersen]

The glory of open-source just keeps these things going.

It may be a decade old but I still regularly use my HD 4870. It is well supported by the radeon(4) driver and runs flawlessly on my OpenBSD workstation.

[gururise]

Have a 4650 laying around, I will certainly try this!

[Dukenukemx]

I still want Vulkan on these older GPU's. Would be nice to run DXVK and VKD3D on them.

[torsionbar28]

HD5000 series is legit. Did loads of bitcoin mining on some HD5850 and HD5870 cards back in the day, 2013 or so.

[Eirikr1848]

I still want Vulkan on these older GPU's. Would be nice to run DXVK and VKD3D on them.

If you can crowdsource the funds for a dev, might be able to make it happen.

Otherwise there’s no reason for a business to invest money into it, and it would be super hard to find someone (or someones) willing to devote their free time to this.

At best we can hope for some kid with one of these older cards who wants to learn something new and writes a Vulkan driver for fun so they can play more games xD

Otherwise begging and groveling is always an option.

(That being said - it would be superneat to see how Zink performs on these if a Vulkan driver existed vs just using the r600 driver)

[Dukenukemx]

If you can crowdsource the funds for a dev, might be able to make it happen.

Otherwise there’s no reason for a business to invest money into it, and it would be super hard to find someone (or someones) willing to devote their free time to this.

At best we can hope for some kid with one of these older cards who wants to learn something new and writes a Vulkan driver for fun so they can play more games xD

Otherwise begging and groveling is always an option.

(That being said - it would be superneat to see how Zink performs on these if a Vulkan driver existed vs just using the r600 driver)

I'm not begging but it does kinda suck that these old DX11 cards can't run DX11 games in Linux. One reason is because OpenGL for the low to mid 6000 series doesn't officially support OpenGL past 3.3 when it did in Windows, though you can fix that with "MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.6" but that doesn't always work. Also even though AMD doesn't update their Windows drivers, people have made modded drivers which greatly enhances their performance. Really did wish we have a kid who wanted to learn writing Vulkan drivers for these cards as they are still very capable today in playing games.

I'm actually in the process of finding a cheap GPU for this old AMD FX 4150 to give to someone as a gift and while I thought about getting some old HD 5850, I'm just going to find a cheap GCN1.0 card and stick it in for compatibility reasons. I actually found out that Hollow Knight defaults to Vulkan, and I have to force OpenGL with -force-opengl in Steam on a Radeon HD 6850. I didn't even know they added Vulkan to Hollow Knight, which shows how long its been since I played the game.

[Eirikr1848]

Ah whoops, I meant that I would be there begging with you xD

I'm not begging but it does kinda suck that these old DX11 cards can't run DX11 games in Linux. One reason is because OpenGL for the low to mid 6000 series doesn't officially support OpenGL past 3.3 when it did in Windows, though you can fix that with "MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.6" but that doesn't always work. Also even though AMD doesn't update their Windows drivers, people have made modded drivers which greatly enhances their performance. Really did wish we have a kid who wanted to learn writing Vulkan drivers for these cards as they are still very capable today in playing games.

I'm actually in the process of finding a cheap GPU for this old AMD FX 4150 to give to someone as a gift and while I thought about getting some old HD 5850, I'm just going to find a cheap GCN1.0 card and stick it in for compatibility reasons. I actually found out that Hollow Knight defaults to Vulkan, and I have to force OpenGL with -force-opengl in Steam on a Radeon HD 6850. I didn't even know they added Vulkan to Hollow Knight, which shows how long its been since I played the game.