Mesa RADV Driver Delivers Conformant Vulkan 1.3 Support For Old AMD GFX6/GFX7 GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa RADV Driver Delivers Conformant Vulkan 1.3 Support For Old AMD GFX6/GFX7 GPUs

While old Radeon GFX6/GFX7 era graphics processors are no longer actively supported by AMD on Windows and haven't been for quite a while, under Linux with the upstream open-source driver stack they remain supported and still enjoying improvements in large part from common code. The most recent fascinating aspect is the old AMD GFX6/GFX7 era GPUs seeing official Vulkan 1.3 support that has been deemed conformant by Khronos...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-GFX6-GFX7-Vulkan-1.3

[schmidtbag]

Though I have upgraded my old R9 290 earlier this year, I do still have it - if it weren't for the lacking VRAM, that GPU still packs a punch today thanks to these kinds of updates. Quite impressive.

[user1]

And this here is why I will only buy AMD cards for my Linux machine. You simply don't get this kind of support with AMD's proprietary drivers and both proprietary and open source drivers from other vendors (looking at you, Intel). As someone who doesn't upgrade his GPU for many years, this is very important for me.

Big thanks to AMD, Valve and everyone involved with AMDGPU, RadeonSi, RADV and related components

[ezst036]

Good to see continued work for these aging graphics cards.

[jeisom]

I wonder how these cards run older vkd3d or dxvk and lower end games at this point or is this mostly helpful for when compositors start using vulkan. Obviously vram would be a limiting factor.

[Type44Q]

Food for thought:

Radeon HD 7990 has 10% greater memory bandwidth than RX 6800 XT...

[Cryio]

Food for thought:

Radeon HD 7990 has 10% greater memory bandwidth than RX 6800 XT...

You're forgetting Infinity Cache. So no, it doesn't have more memory bandwidth than 7990.

[DiamondAngle]

I mean infinity cache only works if (part of) your working set fits into the cache. In bandwith limited compute it dosent help at all. Ofc the 7990 is a dual gpu card so its not very fair either way, but some compute problems are bandwidth limited and scale perfectly across gpus so for those the 7990 will win easy, if you can get the ainchent closed source opencl drivers to work that is. If you need doubles for your compute the 7990 will outperform the 6800xt and the 4090 by 2x in flops.

[MastaG]

I sometimes question Valve's business model..

They're spending money and resources on getting decade old GPU's running modern Vulkan API under Linux/SteamOS.
So that in the end, these aging cards can run VKD3D/DXVK and users can enjoy modern Windows games with Steam Play (Proton).

That's a decision you can make when you're a privately owned company I guess.

However wouldn't it be better to spend the money pushing and lobbying for getting more anti-cheat (drm) protected games to run with Linux instead?

Lately more games are turning on the kernel level anti-cheating features, completely breaking Linux/SteamOS support.

You can hate on these games all you want, but I'd like to play a game of CoD multiplayer (kill confirmed) every now and then.

[cb88]

Food for thought:

Radeon HD 7990 has 10% greater memory bandwidth than RX 6800 XT...

I wonder how it would run KoboldCPP... its technically 2 3GB GPUs though not a single GPU.