The Open-Source ATI R300 Graphics Driver Is Still Being Improved Upon In 2024

[okias]

Do R300 cards even support Wayland compositors? My question is out of pure curiosity because R600 hardware is totally okay for a modern light desktop use.

I was running `weston` on X1250 (RS690/r300) ten years ago

[NSLW]

What is their minimum OpenGL/Vulkan requirement?

I don't know. Certainly not DX9 era GPUs like the featured R300. DX10 era GPUs don't work neither. Chrome says DX12, but I believe maybe DX11 era GPUs would also work.

Eh, at least you can play Tux Racer at blistering framerates!
🐧

Not bad either.

[middy]

people forget retro builds as to why its nice to continue updates for old hardware. retro builds are popular. its fun to play old games on hardware they were designed for and overall nostalgia.

[YCbCr]

What is their minimum OpenGL/Vulkan requirement?

I don't know. Certainly not DX9 era GPUs like the featured R300. DX10 era GPUs don't work neither. Chrome says DX12, but I believe maybe DX11 era GPUs would also work.

Not sure where you got that notion… The minimum for Chromium should be something along the lines of OpenGL ES 2.0. There is a lot of driver and hardware blacklisting going on and there are of course varying degrees of "hardware acceleration" (stuff like WebGPU or WebGL 2.0 will obviously never be supported if the underlying hardware lacks the corresponding features) so I wouldn't bet on R300-500 in particular but a basic accelerated canvas works fine on e.g. VideoCore IV.

[smitty3268]

Do R300 cards even support Wayland compositors? My question is out of pure curiosity because R600 hardware is totally okay for a modern light desktop use.

I believe most compositors have at least some support for GLES 2, which r300 supports. xwayland's glamor backend should support it.

[Paradigm Shifter]

I've still got an X1950XTX in a cupboard. Great card for the day. Hugely overspec cooler compared to the X1900XT(X) meant that it was significantly quieter, too - even at full load. 125W card, so it wasn't exactly light, but idle it barely contributed to my system power consumption (ah, the joys of overclocking Opteron 170s!). First card that I had which could run Crysis comfortably (for me) at 1920x1200, which was the resolution of my monitor.

Although probably my favourite ATi card was my 9500Pro, closely followed by the Sapphire 3870 Atomic, which was a close-to-top-spec card with a single slot cooler. A far cry from the current four-slot monsters... might be why I like the Quadro A4000 cards so much too; a decent amount of power in a single slot form factor (although cramming them in tight means you need to think closely about cooling options...)

[NSLW]

Not sure where you got that notion… The minimum for Chromium should be something along the lines of OpenGL ES 2.0. There is a lot of driver and hardware blacklisting going on and there are of course varying degrees of "hardware acceleration" (stuff like WebGPU or WebGL 2.0 will obviously never be supported if the underlying hardware lacks the corresponding features) so I wouldn't bet on R300-500 in particular but a basic accelerated canvas works fine on e.g. VideoCore IV.

I got that notion from my own experience. OpenGL ES 2.0 showed hardware acceleration not so long ago in Chrome for proprietary NVIDIA (nouveau supports OpenGL ES 3.0 on the same HW), but now shows "Software only" for everything.

I believe it might have something to do with a recent move on WebGPU in Chrome. That's where I got the notion on what's needed to get HW-accelerated-anything in Chrome.

[lorn10]

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/.../-/issues/1609

I believe most compositors have at least some support for GLES 2, which r300 supports. xwayland's glamor backend should support it.

Yes, but an usable / reliable GLES2 support in Glamor was just recently added. This was broken / incomplete in different ways. For more information check "RFC: Backport GL ES patches to xserver 21.1".

And by the way, as of early 2024, Glamor is (still) disabled for the r300 driver. But there is some progress to enable it at least for R500 hardware, - an important prerequisite landed recently with Mesa MR 26877.

Finally it would be super helpful if someone with the corresponding skills could review the following X server MR "glamor: Fallback to software rendering on GLSL link failure". That one would allow to enable Glamor on older R400 and perhaps also R300 Radeon hardware. This is true even for the more limited Intel iGPU hardware and other D3D9 SM 2.0 GPUs of that era.

[lorn10]

YCbCr
NSLW

Perhaps the Chrome based Falkon web-browser still supports GLES2 hardware properly. However, I am almost absolutely sure that the hardware WebRender feature of Firefox needs GLES3 support otherwise it falls back to software mode.

[Eirikr1848]

It is reasonable that with as fast as hardware is these days (and the days when R300 was new) that for light browsing and other simple tasks people keep their hardware for a 20 year or more window.

This hardware is old, but it is not ancient.

I have a laptop with an AMD-TK... Something CPU. 2.8GHz dual-core, 2MB L2 Cache. Radeon Xpress 200 iGPU, 4GB DDR2.

Currently using CachyOS and it seems performant enough with an SSD.

Need to force Firefox and and Chromium flags to get hardware acceleration and webgl... But it works.

No hardware accelerated video decode though and I cannot seem to find a solution for x264 and x265 on OpenGL 2.x so CPU Rendering it is for movies.