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

[YCbCr]

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.

So, out of curiosity I just tried this in a live ISO on an old HP laptop. Unfortunately I misremembered about the GPU being a Mobility Radeon 2300 (RV515), it's actually a Mobility Radeon 3400 series (RV620) and therefor uses R600g (OpenGL 3.3, OpenGL ES 3.0, no Vulkan).

Anyways, Firefox defaulted to Software Webrender (apparently as a workaround for a bug with some ancient Mesa / R600 version, according to about:support) but I was able to force enable it (I think, about:support is rather confusing in this regard).

Chromium 119 defaulted to the following:

[Paulie889]

Haha, I always wonder how Michael chooses what MRs are news worthy, in fact this one was mostly cleanups and moving code between NIR frontend and backend, but as lorn10 noticed https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/...requests/26877 was way more important in that it actually fixed glamor on R400 and R500 (which was broken by some previous mesa core changes). You don't really need glamor if you run X either with compositor or some lightweight desktop where the old xf86 driver is still fine, but if you have wayland, glamor is needed for acceleration in Xwayland).

Just to clarify, all the GPUs should be able to run recent DEs both old X or wayland (but I have not tested KDE in a long time). And I'll be happy to look into issues reported at the mesa issues tracker at freedesktop gitlab. OpenGL ES 2.0 support is very polished, we have few fails (for some fringe features which the HW can't do and almost nobody uses) but other than that we pass like 99.8% of dEQP gles2 test suite. So anything using OpenGL ES 2.0 should run just fine. Desktop OpenGL 2.1 is pushing the HW a bit more (especially the older generations), but at least the latest R500 cards should be also fine. We also support nine on R500.

What is really broken is POWERPC support. :-( We have quite a lot of users with old Power Macs and there nothing really works. Unfortunately I don't have any hardware to debug, and I was not successful in fixing it just from the provided logs, so if someone has some working Power hw with R300-R500 GPU (or with a PCIe slot into which I could plug one) and would be willing to send it, that would be much appreciated.

But yeah, don't expect anything exciting, most of the recent work on r300 is to remove code from the old shader backend and use more mesa core NIR stuff and in general try to keep up with core mesa changes. What might be a bit exciting from the developer point of view is that there will be a r300 mesa CI soon, so hopefully we get less regressions in the future.

[nuetzel]

What is really broken is POWER support. :-( We have quite a lot of users with old Power Macs and there nothing really works. Unfortunately I don't have any hardware to debug, and I was not successful in fixing it just from the provided logs, so if someone has some working Power hw with R300-R500 GPU (or with a PCIe slot into which I could plug one) and would be willing to send it, that would be much appreciated.

[snip]

What might be a bit exciting from the developer point of view is that there will be a r300 mesa CI soon, so hopefully we get less regressions in the future.

Where should I send (to whom) my AMD Radeon 8xxx/9xxx (AGP) gfk cards?
Have several to offer over the years.

[Paulie889]

Where should I send (to whom) my AMD Radeon 8xxx/9xxx (AGP) gfk cards?
Have several to offer over the years.

Thanks for the offer, but I don't have any AGP motherboards anymore so can't use those (I still also have one old AGP Radeon 9600 but nowhere to put it into). Some R400 family GPU I could use, I have R300 and lot of R500 but really the power support is where I'm missing testing coverage the most...

[nuetzel]

Could this, help?:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1609#note_2227459

[860lacov]

5c1bb61dbfa3ac2765618ddb60005ba5--terminator-genesis-terminator-movies.jpg
Old but...

[NSLW]

So, out of curiosity I just tried this in a live ISO on an old HP laptop. Unfortunately I misremembered about the GPU being a Mobility Radeon 2300 (RV515), it's actually a Mobility Radeon 3400 series (RV620) and therefor uses R600g (OpenGL 3.3, OpenGL ES 3.0, no Vulkan).

Anyways, Firefox defaulted to Software Webrender (apparently as a workaround for a bug with some ancient Mesa / R600 version, according to about:support) but I was able to force enable it (I think, about:support is rather confusing in this regard).

I can force enable HW rendering in Firefox as well but performance was not better than Chromium on SW rendering.

Chromium 119 defaulted to the following:

Nice. Beside me using Chromium 120 there is also a difference in OpenGL ES 3.0. I need to check that again with nouveau which supports this.

[NSLW]

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.

On DistroWatch CachyOS is advertised as compiled with x86-64-v3. How can this work on AMD-TK... Something CPU?

[GreenReaper]

On DistroWatch CachyOS is advertised as compiled with x86-64-v3. How can this work on AMD-TK... Something CPU?

It supports it (and also x86-64-v4 for kernels) but also standard x86-64.

[Eirikr1848]

Thanks for the offer, but I don't have any AGP motherboards anymore so can't use those (I still also have one old AGP Radeon 9600 but nowhere to put it into). Some R400 family GPU I could use, I have R300 and lot of R500 but really the power support is where I'm missing testing coverage the most...

I have a POWER5 server in storage. POWER6 MAYBE? idk. That being said, a laptop is more realistic.

I have an iBook with a 9550 I believe, which is RV3xx architecture. It's ready to go, in a box. (Someone claimed to be affiliated with the ArchLinuxPOWER project but turns out not to be the case)

{The actual project page is: https://archlinuxpower.org/}

I also have one with R200 hardware if you are a glutton for punishment and are in the mood for making an R200 Gallium driver. (Because, you know, it's oh-so-easy).