Nouveau Working On Bringing Up Some OpenGL Compute Shader Support For NV50 Era GPUs

[Shiba]

Nvidia actively supports even the GeForce FX series from 20 years ago.

No they don't. Everything prior to 700 is on life support and everything prior to 400 is unsupported

[lorn10]

Would be good to see OpenCL on AMD/ATI TeraScale 1. Mesa OpenCL starts with TeraScale 2, but TeraScale 1 were OpenCL capable.

To be a little more precise, only the R700 (Radeon HD 4000 series) had official OpenCL 1.1 support. All other TeraScale 1 hardware is only "Close to Metal" compliant. And according to the following interesting tech report article, https://techreport.com/news/18201/am...s-with-opencl/, the overall OpenCL performance was not really outstanding. (In certain situations a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU was near double as fast.) So it is questionable whether it is worthwhile to implement a Mesa OpenCL support for such old hardware.

In contrast, I would appreciate a better OpenCL support for the TeraScale 2 based Radeon HD 6000 series (like the TURKS hardware). Maybe we will see on that "front" during the next months some progress. But also here it should be noted that the OpenCL performance will not be as great because of some further shortcomings of the TeraScale architecture. It looks that consistently solid OpenCL results were not possible before the later GCN architecture which was also developed with a "computing perspective" in mind.

[StarterX4]

Nvidia actively supports even the GeForce FX series from 20 years ago. Unlike Mesa devs that can't copy and paste 5 lines of free public code to have OGL4 support on Terascale. Go figure...

GF 5 FX Series were supported up to 2013 on Linux (173) and up to 2008 on WinXP (175).
Quadro FX Series were supported up to 2019 on Lin (340) and up to 2016 on Win7/10 (R340).

Yeah, actively supports, spiritually.

[bridgman]

Nvidia actively supports even the GeForce FX series from 20 years ago. Unlike Mesa devs that can't copy and paste 5 lines of free public code to have OGL4 support on Terascale. Go figure...

Aren't the Terascale parts already at GL 4.5 ?

I'm not sure about the status of the FP64 emulation code but if it's not there yet over-riding with environment variables works fine AFAIK since FP64 isn't actually used.

[guara]

I would think these prehistoric beasts have been extinct.

I still have my NV40 Geforce 6200 AGP. If only I had the patience to recap it and a compatible motherboard...

My current setup is based on Kepler and first generation Maxwell all running Nouveau. Technically I could install the "evil drivers" to get Vulkan and CUDA/OpenCL on the Maaxwell, but the Kepler one is a mobile device and its last supported "evil driver" keeps glitching my laptop with unreliable suspension and Optimus support.

[lorn10]

Aren't the Terascale parts already at GL 4.5 ?

I'm not sure about the status of the FP64 emulation code but if it's not there yet over-riding with environment variables works fine AFAIK since FP64 isn't actually used.

Exactly, FP64 emulation is missing. That's the reason why my TURKS Radeon is still on GL 3.3. If I enforce higher GL in "/etc/environment" I will get GL 4.5 and GLSL 430. So i set both to same level, GL 4.3 and GLSL 430. Unfortunately Firefox thinks now that i am cheating and tells me "BLOCKLIST_FEATURE_FAILURE_SOFTWARE_GL".

Whatever, there is finally an experimental FP64 emulation available in Mesa 21.1. So I hope that it will be in near feature officially introduced. Alternatively, when I am on 21.1, I can set "R600_DEBUG=nir" and Firefox will be hopefully happy.

[MadeUpName]

Sounds like NVidia isn't very optimistic about being able to supply new cards any time soon.

[kiffmet]

What I'd like to see even more than GPU compute capabilites, is automatic reclocking for the 9400M. The 340 series nvidia proprietary driver will get phased out soon and already has numerous issues. Does anyone know what's missing to implement this, where it would plug into the Kernel (dvfs/devfreq?) and maybe have some literature suggestions on how to write such an algorithm?

[numacross]

Sounds like NVidia isn't very optimistic about being able to supply new cards any time soon.

Don't worry, they sell all they can produce, just not to us peasants

[bridgman]

Exactly, FP64 emulation is missing. That's the reason why my TURKS Radeon is still on GL 3.3. If I enforce higher GL in "/etc/environment" I will get GL 4.5 and GLSL 430. So i set both to same level, GL 4.3 and GLSL 430. Unfortunately Firefox thinks now that i am cheating and tells me "BLOCKLIST_FEATURE_FAILURE_SOFTWARE_GL".

I didn't see anything in the docco about blacklisting based on use of environment variables so maybe there's some other reason ? According to the docco (which was last updated in 2016 unfortunately) the only blocking that should happen by default is for webgl, so it's possible that forcing webgl will avoid the message:

If you would like to forcibly enable a graphics feature that is blocked on your system, follow these instructions. Warning: do this at your own risk. There usually are good reasons why features are blocked.

To force-enable WebGL, go to about:config and set webgl.force-enabled=true.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers