R600 Gallium3D Picks Up Another OpenGL 4.5 Extension

[chithanh]

OEM stuff is something that is often found in second hand markets and 7000 series is now in the age that ends up there.

True, but that is not what I meant. I meant product like the Radeon HD 6770 which started as OEM product in the West and as retail product in China (and only later came to retail in the West), or R9 370 / R9 370X (not to be confused with R7 370) which are OEM-only in the West and/or official retail products in China.

[leipero]

This is impressive, especially having on mind that AMD dropped support for those GPU's. Have to say, r600g works fine with 3.3 support, it can only get better with 4.x.

[Tomin]

True, but that is not what I meant. I meant product like the Radeon HD 6770 which started as OEM product in the West and as retail product in China (and only later came to retail in the West), or R9 370 / R9 370X (not to be confused with R7 370) which are OEM-only in the West and/or official retail products in China.

Yeah, I didn't try to say that you said something wrong, but just point out a reason why a person might have or might be getting one of those.

[Guy1524]

I would be interested in a Windows r600 vs Mesa r600 openGL and/or Gallium Nine D3D

[bridgman]

This is impressive, especially having on mind that AMD dropped support for those GPU's. Have to say, r600g works fine with 3.3 support, it can only get better with 4.x.

Sorry, when did we drop support for those GPUs ? We dropped fglrx (for all GPUs, not just r600 family) but continued to support the open source drivers.

[Hadrian]

The OpenSource driver developers do a great work, as does Michael for reporting in great detail about all this interesting things. Thank you all!

I too have got HD 6000 and HD 7000 series desktop cards in my various computers and it's fantastic to see they run better with each new Linux+driver version.

I don't need the newest 3D graphics stuff, but for classical 3D games and for all my 3D applications like Blender, these AMD cards continue to do a really great job with no noise because of passive cooling.

AMD chips in combination with OpenSource software are my favourites! :-) Great to see AMD Linux developers here on the forum, too.

[leipero]

Sorry, when did we drop support for those GPUs ? We dropped fglrx (for all GPUs, not just r600 family) but continued to support the open source drivers.

I was refering to "general" driver support (as for Windows Operating System). last driver for HD6000 series comes from 2015 i think, that's when support was dropped for pre 7000 series, and they are under legacy. So my understanding is that support is stopped at around 2015, or at least extensive support and moved to legacy.

[bridgman]

Ahh, I understand. Yeah, it's funny how things work out... we actually end up supporting Linux drivers longer than Windows these days. Of course that's the way it needs to be since Windows has a stable ABI to keep older drivers working longer, but still a big change from 10 years ago.

[leipero]

bridgman Yeah, that's what I was refering to, I should have been more clear. Windows probably do have advantages, but legacy driver should probably be updated at this time (after 2-3 years since last update), because there are UE4 (I think it's 4) engine games that spew errors when SM 5.0 is required, I can't recall now, but i think that was the case, and that hardware should support SM 5.0/DX11. Off topic ofc., but periodic legacy driver updates for Windows OS is probably needed, and for sure, the question is if can be justified to spend resources on hardware that old very few (?) people use.

[smitty3268]

Sorry, when did we drop support for those GPUs ? We dropped fglrx (for all GPUs, not just r600 family) but continued to support the open source drivers.

I guess it depends on your definition of support. Obviously the r600 family is in legacy support mode - from what i can see, AMD devs don't even work on bug fixes for r600 anymore, to the point of not even reviewing 3rd party patches fixing bugs. But equally obviously, the drivers are still running and are kept up to date so they run on new kernels, x, etc.

I'd be a lot more generous with AMD on this topic if r600 had been left in better shape. Missing GL4 support and lots of bugs when trying to run against newer games meant that the choice between r600 and fgrlx wasn't really clear. Luckily Dave and some other 3rd party contributors have been stepping up to fix that, and hopefully in the future SI+ cards will be closer to feature complete by the time they're moved to legacy.