Mesa 21.3.3 Released With Fixes For Old ATI R300~R500 GPUs, RADV Fixes Too

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 21.3.3 Released With Fixes For Old ATI R300~R500 GPUs, RADV Fixes Too

For those sticking to stable Mesa point releases, Mesa 21.3.3 is out today to close out the year. Notable with Mesa 21.3.3 is the large number of fixes for older ATI Radeon R300 through R500 (X1000 series) GPU fixes with the R300 Gallium3D driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-21.3.3-Released

[coder]

So, I'm looking at https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/ but still not sure if Evergreen use the r600 driver. The oldest PCIe GPU I have is a HD 5450, which is nice because it's <= 10 W and passively-cooled. I'd just like to confirm which driver that and my Northern Islands GPU (HD 6850) use.

[smitty3268]

So, I'm looking at https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/ but still not sure if Evergreen use the r600 driver. The oldest PCIe GPU I have is a HD 5450, which is nice because it's <= 10 W and passively-cooled. I'd just like to confirm which driver that and my Northern Islands GPU (HD 6850) use.

They both use the r600 driver.

The HD 2000 series was the first r600 card, and the HD 7000 series was the first GCN card (using radeonsi).

[ubuntulove74]

Is the ATI 2600 pro an R300 family?

[Mike Frett]

The fans on these cards usually die around ~3 years. I don't see how anyone would still be using these without a fan replacement. AMD bought ATI in 2006 for goodness sake.

[V1tol]

The fans on these cards usually die around ~3 years. I don't see how anyone would still be using these without a fan replacement. AMD bought ATI in 2006 for goodness sake.

My parents have my old Phenom II X3 unlocked with 890G chipset, which has integrated Radeon 4290. No fans required

[coder]

The fans on these cards usually die around ~3 years. I don't see how anyone would still be using these without a fan replacement. AMD bought ATI in 2006 for goodness sake.

It's not "still", as I haven't been using them continuously. It's more like that I swap them into a machine where I need occasional console/local-GUI access. And that also means I'm basically never running them flat out.

The last time I actually used the HD 6850, I had to swap it out after tripping over the fact that its driver maxed out at OpenGL 3.x, at the time. Now that it can run up to 4.5, I might swap it in for the HD 7870 that I have, given the latter's fans sound like a leaf blower when they spin up. I'm not honestly sure if those died, or if they always sucked, because I run that card under load so rarely.

BTW, I have an old 9600 Pro and a X1350 Pro lying around, which worked fine when I took them out of service, but don't foresee using due to being AGP and my last AGP system being a Pentium 4. The only reason I upgraded from the 9600 Pro was to get multi-monitor @ 1920x1200, which that card couldn't do under Linux, at the time. The X1350 Pro had the honor of being the first GPU where I dabbled with GLSL.

In the interest of more performance I actually picked up a X1650 Pro, which was a mistake, because it didn't seem that much faster than the X1350 Pro and sounded like a hairdrier, even at idle!

[bridgman]

Is the ATI 2600 pro an R300 family?

It was early R600 family - R600 was first, then RV610/630/670 (aka Shaka, Laka and Boom).

I'm pretty sure the 2600 Pro was an RV630.

[microcode]

The fans on these cards usually die around ~3 years. I don't see how anyone would still be using these without a fan replacement. AMD bought ATI in 2006 for goodness sake.

Legit never seen a fan die; not a card fan, a CPU cooler fan, nor a case fan. I have machines running right now that have been turned on for six years without interruption.

[coder]

Legit never seen a fan die; not a card fan, a CPU cooler fan, nor a case fan. I have machines running right now that have been turned on for six years without interruption.

Lucky you.

I had a Radeon 9700 Pro that I didn't even push very hard and its fan completely died in less than a year. It was a known problem, and ATI did a cross-ship exchange. That was a card I used at work, so I didn't list it above.

Most often, the problem I've had with fans is the bearings wear out and they start making annoying noises. That happened to one PSU I owned and to several case fans in some old Dell Precision workstations we had at the office. Also to various boxed CPU coolers in some even older (non-Dell) machines we had at work.

More recently, I have a Skylake-H Dell Precision laptop (for work) that would often fail to POST on warm-boot with fan errors, and it indeed would do a weird oscillating thing sometimes, under load. I'm not sure it's an issue with the actual fan, but either disabling turbo or installing BIOS updates seems to have tamed the problem enough that I haven't investigated further. And yes, I've cleared the cooling channels of any dust, repeatedly.

At home, I've switched to exclusively Noctua fans and Seasonic PSUs. Never had any issues with those, in the 10 years or so since I first started to switched over.