Open-Source Vulkan Driver Continues To Be Worked On For Old Radeon HD 6000 Series GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Open-Source Vulkan Driver Continues To Be Worked On For Old Radeon HD 6000 Series GPUs

The "Terakan" Vulkan driver continues to be developed as an open-source Vulkan API implementation catering to the aging Radeon HD 6000 series graphics processors...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/R600g-Terakan-Green-Sprite

[tildearrow]

Typo:

One month ago I wrote about this experimental Vukan driver

[skeevy420]

Phonetically, that's a pretty Vukan funny typo.

Anyways, they're not OLD GPUs, they're VINTAGE.

Stuff like this is why I like Linux. Where other operating systems depreciate things, Linux tries to keep them alive. The irony of that statement is that I reckon Michael is about to release an article about what Linux 6.5 or 6.6 will be depreciating.

[schmidtbag]

Stuff like this is why I like Linux. Where other operating systems depreciate things, Linux tries to keep them alive. The irony of that statement is that I reckon Michael is about to release an article about what Linux 6.5 or 6.6 will be depreciating.

I think it's a healthy balance - the community keeps alive things that people actually use or can still serve a function, while deprecating things that are a struggle to keep alive and lack the ROI. Personally, I think we ought to be a little more aggressive in deprecating hardware. If the product hasn't been manufactured for 30+ years, it really doesn't need to be in a modern kernel. That doesn't mean you can't still use it, but such a product won't benefit from a modern kernel.

[skeevy420]

I think it's a healthy balance - the community keeps alive things that people actually use or can still serve a function, while deprecating things that are a struggle to keep alive and lack the ROI. Personally, I think we ought to be a little more aggressive in deprecating hardware. If the product hasn't been manufactured for 30+ years, it really doesn't need to be in a modern kernel. That doesn't mean you can't still use it, but such a product won't benefit from a modern kernel.

I agree, especially when old kernels (sometimes) work on modern distributions and old distributions and repositories still exist. Combine that with a plethora of ways to use them from VMs to chroots to DistroBoxes and it's not a big deal when mainline drops obscure hardware from 1998 or Fedora 41 doesn't support software from 2003.

[Developer12]

People with these cards, especially built into laptops, will be very grateful to still be able to run an accelerated wayland desktop when vulkan becomes a more hard requirement in 5 to 10 years.

[SofS]

This is not so much about performance as it is about compatibility. The are a number of interfaces and SDKs defaulting to Vulkan, therefore being compliant with the Vulkan specification will ensure everything works.

[ezst036]

I think it's a healthy balance - the community keeps alive things that people actually use or can still serve a function, while deprecating things that are a struggle to keep alive and lack the ROI. Personally, I think we ought to be a little more aggressive in deprecating hardware. If the product hasn't been manufactured for 30+ years, it really doesn't need to be in a modern kernel. That doesn't mean you can't still use it, but such a product won't benefit from a modern kernel.

Precisely.

When PCMCIA things are being deprecated and nobody uses them anymore, but Radeon HD 6000 series chips/cards are still out there - most likely in laptops - there's both an audience and a target consumer. The contrast is very clear.

That's the healthy balance. Heck, there's even still support for Motorola 68000's out there. That's because there's a consuming audience.

[QuImUfu]

Radeon HD 6000 series are also quite capable, very cheap GPUs. They are about €10 where I live and plenty fast for most 2D and many easy-to-run (e.g. Minecraft) or older 3D games. If they get a decent level of Vulkan support, they will be a solid option for multi-display office/casual gaming systems on a budget. The high-end 6000 GPUs still easily surpass current gen iGPUs, aside from offering more display outputs.
The value proposition of course highly depends on usage patterns and energy pricing in your region…

[AndyChow]

I still have a radeon HD 6850 somewhere. I think I retired it near a decade ago because it was no longer able to play most games. It was never a very good card.

It launched at $179 USD. Remember when GPUs used to be reasonably priced?