Radeon R600g Driver Retires Its SB Optimizer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon R600g Driver Retires Its SB Optimizer

A decade ago the Radeon R600g SB shader back-end proved useful for boosting gaming performance on pre-GCN graphics cards of the time and proved useful. But in more recent years in the R600g switch to NIR, the SB path hasn't received much attention and its benefits have diminished. The R600g SB code has now been dropped...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/R600g-SB-Optimizer-Dropped

[Dukenukemx]

Got my HD 6850 running as a HTPC and was shocked at what it can still do today. It plays Citra emulator just fine, so long as I don't update it. Last year they required OpenGL 4.3, and I'm not sure if the 6850 can do it. I could try MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.3 but I wasn't going to risk updating it. Borderlands 2 runs perfectly as well through Steam. Fallout New Vegas with Gallium Nine runs great. As long as you don't look to playing modern games, you can get away with a lot on these GPU's.

[JustK]

Dukenukemx mesamatrix.net and wikipedia say the HD 6000 series support OpenGL 4.5 since Mesa 21.0

[Anux]

It's biggest problem will be the 1 GB VRAM and for me personally the noise might be to high. But yeah I also like reusing old hardware, it's fun and saves the environement as well as money.

[Cryio]

Got my HD 6850 running as a HTPC and was shocked at what it can still do today. It plays Citra emulator just fine, so long as I don't update it. Last year they required OpenGL 4.3, and I'm not sure if the 6850 can do it. I could try MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.3 but I wasn't going to risk updating it. Borderlands 2 runs perfectly as well through Steam. Fallout New Vegas with Gallium Nine runs great. As long as you don't look to playing modern games, you can get away with a lot on these GPU's.

HD 5000 and 6000 support OpenGL 4.5, so literally all emulators except for Xenia will run flawless on them. It's only HD 2000-3000-4000 that have to run quite older builds of emulators due to being stuck on OpenGL 3.3.

[bridgman]

I remember when Vadim first added the SB code back in 2013 - it really made a big difference in performance at the time.

[Vorpal]

It's biggest problem will be the 1 GB VRAM and for me personally the noise might be to high. But yeah I also like reusing old hardware, it's fun and saves the environement as well as money.

Saves the environment up to a point. Power efficiency has increased massively over time. A modern low power part can do the same job as an old high power part, at a fraction of the power.

If this matters to you will depend on a lot of things, such as cost of electricity, if you need to run an AC that you otherwise wouldn't have needed, what generates the electricity in your case, etc.

[Dukenukemx]

Dukenukemx mesamatrix.net and wikipedia say the HD 6000 series support OpenGL 4.5 since Mesa 21.0

I gotta try more games. Vulkan would helpful because a lot of DX11 games would work on this GPU on Windows, but since Dx11 is synonymous to Vulkan on Linux, you really do need Vulkan to get close to Windows performance with DX11. I'm just glad nobody gave up on this hardware, because AMD certainly did when GCN was released. I have a Vega 56, RX 480, R9 Fury, and etc so it's not out of necessity.

[Anux]

A modern low power part can do the same job as an old high power part, at a fraction of the power.

Sure and while you save a minuscule amount of energy a new part has to be build with all the environmental impact and the old hardware has to be "recycled" like so: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...ica-180957597/

[emansom]

...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-behind-e-waste-dump-africa-180957597/

This seems more like an intellectual challenge on all sides than an environmental one. Educate the locals there first, and don't export our old electronics there if they end up burning it.