R600 Gallium3D Driver Receives NIR Backend Fixes For Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Series

In addition to the R300g driver seeing new shader optimizations, also being merged this week to Mesa 22.3 were some fixes for the recently-introduced new NIR back-end for the Rade R600 Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series.

Earlier this summer the new R600g NIR back-end code was merged. While the R600g driver supports from the Radeon HD 2000 "R600" to Radeon HD 6000 "Northern Islands" product families, the initial focus with the NIR code was on the newer HD 5000/6000 series. Since the start of August though, there has been R600g NIR work for the pre-Evergeen (pre HD 5000 series) hardware.

Old Radeon graphics cards continue to see Linux driver improvements thanks to the code being open-source.

Merged this week were more R600g NIR "sfn" fixes for the pre-Evergreen hardware. There is a handful of fixes, affecting around 400 lines of code now merged in mainline Mesa.

See the merge request for all the details on these improvements for older Radeon GPUs in making this new back-end more viable for enhancing the OpenGL gaming performance on the HD 2000/3000/4000 series hardware. Gert Wollny continues to do a great, devoted job continuing to improve the Mesa R600 Gallium3D driver with AMD having long since shifted their focus to their newer generations of hardware support. Like with the R300g work this weekend, these improvements are all possible thanks to their fully open-source Linux driver stack.