R600 Gallium3D Driver Receives NIR Backend Fixes For Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Series

[xen0n]

Mistaken the cover pic for 3 bars of chocolate, wondered for a sec why chocolate is relevant to the antiquated cards before looking closer

[Dukenukemx]

technically wouldn't it be GCN v1? i know its "experimental" but it technically works.

It works just fine. I even wrote a guide that still works today. Though I don't know if they fixed it with newer kernels breaking support.

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=272283

[Eirikr1848]

What is the oldest Radeon hardware that's supported by Radv and AMD's official Vulkan driver?

I have an ECS motherboard with a Kabini-based APU (E1-2100) along with a Radeon HD 7700 GPU ("GCN 1.0" or "Southern Islands") which required a bit of manual intervention. So really, "GCN 1.0" and later would be the cut-off point for RADV with modprobe.d radeon blacklisting, etc.

GCN 2 or "Sea Islands" also appears to require manual intervention for RADV Vulkan to work as expected (with an R9 290, which is GCN 2.0, the 280X was GCN 3.0) .

(Link to the Arch Wiki post attached for said manual intervention)

In terms of "APU platforms" from oldest to newest would be Kaveri, Bald Eagle, Kabini, Tamash, Beema, Mullins, Steppe Eagle, Crowned Eagle, LX embedded, Godavari and Carrizo-L needing manual intervention || Carrizo, Toronto, Merlin Falcon, Brown Falcon, then Bristol Ridge would be the pre-Zen APU platforms to permit RADV without intervention.

In terms of dedicated chips/AIB platforms, we'd be looking: Oland, Cape Verde, Pitcairn, Tahiti, Bonaire and Hawaii for GCN1/2 needing manual intervention for RADV || Tonga, Fiji, Polaris, Vega would be the GCN 3, 4, and 5 chips that work fine with RADV without additional effort.

----

GCN 1.0 and newer works with HSA as of 2014 onward, but RoCM only supports Polaris and newer... so my "speculation" is that AMDVLK (both open and closed) will work with GCN 4.0/Polaris cards and newer officially -- but its nearly midnight and I'm just checking all my nerdy forums before bed so my brain hurts a little more than usual trying to parse this clearly.

EDIT: Woke up, randomly installed amdvlk because I cannot fall back asleep. It appears my R9 290 on Arch kind of works... but not fully:

deviceName = Unknown AMD GPU
driverID = DRIVER_ID_AMD_OPEN_SOURCE
driverName = AMD open-source driver
driverInfo = 2022.Q3.3 (LLPC)
conformanceVersion = 1.3.0.0

[skeevy420]

What is the oldest Radeon hardware that's supported by Radv and AMD's official Vulkan driver?

Per AMD's AMDVLK documentation, Polaris/RX 400. That's where AMD drew the line for AMDVLK. For GPUs before the RX 400s you have to use the 2021.Q2.5 AMDVLK release. After that they depreciated support for older than Polaris. That said -- people with older GPUs may or may not get lucky with newer AMDVLK releases and, even if they don't get lucky, AMDVLK isn't the best driver for playing games so they won't be missing anything special.

Per AMD's AMDGPU documentation, most GCN2 GPUs and up. That's where AMD drew the line for AMDGPU-Pro. The same gaming disclaimer applies here. RADV is almost always better.

It varies based on which documentation you read, but unless you have a really good GCN2 or GCN3 GPU you're better off with Polaris/GCN4 and up in regards to gaming compatibility and regular end-user desktop usage.

Vega/GCN5 and up is better for professional users...people needing OpenCL, ROCm, and all that.

[skeevy420]

GCN 1.0 and newer works with HSA as of 2014 onward, but RoCM only supports Polaris and newer... so my "speculation" is that AMDVLK (both open and closed) will work with GCN 4.0/Polaris cards and newer officially -- but its nearly midnight and I'm just checking all my nerdy forums before bed so my brain hurts a little more than usual trying to parse this clearly.

EDIT: Woke up, randomly installed amdvlk because I cannot fall back asleep. It appears my R9 290 on Arch kind of works... but not fully:

deviceName = Unknown AMD GPU
driverID = DRIVER_ID_AMD_OPEN_SOURCE
driverName = AMD open-source driver
driverInfo = 2022.Q3.3 (LLPC)
conformanceVersion = 1.3.0.0

Yep. AMD depreciated AMDVLK for pre-Polaris. There's a link in my post above to the last AMDVLK release that supports your GPU.

Technically speaking based on their docs, the AMDVLK version shipping with AMDGPU-Pro supports your GPU. I wonder if that's an oversight on AMD's part? I wonder if pre-Polaris will be depreciated by AMDGPU-Pro?

[Eirikr1848]

Yep. AMD depreciated AMDVLK for pre-Polaris. There's a link in my post above to the last AMDVLK release that supports your GPU.

Technically speaking based on their docs, the AMDVLK version shipping with AMDGPU-Pro supports your GPU. I wonder if that's an oversight on AMD's part? I wonder if pre-Polaris will be depreciated by AMDGPU-Pro?

I'm using AMDVLK from the Arch repos and it seems to work fine with vkmark as a quick test... other than showing I'm on an "Unknown AMD GPU".

In that case ++ the proprietary driver support case is it an oversight? Or just an undocumented olive branch to users on older hardware / "people who bought hardware and supported AMD during its dark years"

[skeevy420]

I'm using AMDVLK from the Arch repos and it seems to work fine with vkmark as a quick test... other than showing I'm on an "Unknown AMD GPU".

In that case ++ the proprietary driver support case is it an oversight? Or just an undocumented olive branch to users on older hardware / "people who bought hardware and supported AMD during its dark years"

I think it mostly comes down to how those GPUs were supported when those distributions were released so AMD just can't drop hardware support at random. It wouldn't at all surprise me if AMDGPU-Pro drops all pre-Polaris GPUs when the enterprise and LTS distributions have new versions come out. Pro dropping Polaris and moving to Vega and up wouldn't surprise me either since that would make it more in line with what ROCm officially supports.