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

[Dukenukemx]

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?

I got more Radeon HD 6000's than any other GPU. I have a HD 6850 and a number of desktops and laptops that have these GPU's built in. Games like Hollow Knight already use Vulkan and already run on these GPU's with OpenGL, so the addition to Vulkan would be great.

[stevewmn]

I'm sitting here with a Radeon 6700XT graphics card thinking "it can't be that old. Oh, so AMD decided to confuse us with new 6000 series GPUs 10 years after using that numbering scheme before." Got it.

[tildearrow]

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.

Industrial control panels look angry....

[M@GOid]

Valve enabled Vulkan in most of their games, and those where launched around the time those old HD6000 GPUs were brand new. So yes, there are a bunch of games out there that those cards can play very well. And those are very good games.

[schmidtbag]

Industrial control panels look angry....

Ancient industrial hardware tends to remain in use because it can't be updated, in which case, maintaining them through modern kernels doesn't really have much purpose. Not to mention - in most of these cases, they use closed-source software, which is another thing that keeps the organization tethered to outdated hardware.

[vipor29]

i have a 5870 laying around. i doubt i will ever use it again, i also have a radeon 360 laying around.

[Eirikr1848]

League of Legends on Wine, Civilization VI... seems games like that would benefit greatly from a Vulkan driver.

[Eirikr1848]

Has anyone seen any updates regarding progress on this driver?

Also curious to see Zink performance vs. native