AMD's 22-year-old GPUs are still getting driver updates — ATI's R300 - R500 from the early 2000s live on in Linux driver patches thanks to the open-source community
AMD's 22-year-old GPUs are still getting driver updates — ATI's R300 - R500 from the early 2000s live on in Linux driver patches thanks to the open-source community
If you still have a GPU like the ATI Radeon 9700 PRO, you can still use it on modern Linux operating systems.
The GPU featured an AGP interface (an ancient competitor to PCIe)
AAAHHH!! Right in my lower back! mumble, mumble get off my lawn.
Tell us, grandpa, what was dial-up like?
V.92 Screeching "GET OFF THE PHONE!"
do, do, dee, deeep, shhhh, reeee, ooooh, shhhhhh, eeeee, EEEEEE
That doesn't seem accurate. AGP was an improvement on PCI, and PCIe was the successor to both.
Can someone explain to a noob why driver updates are useful after so many years?
Is it about compatibility?
Most of the updates are about long term support the performance gains are a side product.
This driver was one of the earliest open source drivers developed by AMD. The point of the driver is to convert OpenGL (instructions games give to draw 3D shapes) into the low level commands a graphics card uses.
A library (TMSC I think) was written to do this, however they found OpenGL commands often relied on the results of others and converting back to OpenGL was really CPU expensive.
So someone invented NIR, its an intermediate layer. You convert all OpenGL commands to NIR and it uses way less CPU to convert from NIR to GPU commands and back.
People in their spare time have been updating the old AMD drivers so they use the same libraries, interfaces, etc.. as the modern AMD drivers.
This update removes the last of the TMSC? usage so now the driver uses only NIR.
From a dev perspective everything now works the same way (less effort) from a user perspective those old cards get the performance bump NIR brought.
Thank you
That is an extremely well-written technical explanation for folks that don't write code to interact with graphics APIs. Thank you
Yup, these updates help make sure your gpu still works with each os update, as well as maybe fixing a bit of uncaught issues/bugs
Thank you
Other people have mentioned it a bit, but a huge thing in my opinion is just support for newer kernels. I held on to a GTX 570 for a looong time because it worked just fine for everything I wanted to play, but I was kind of upset because 1) it never got the Vulkan support Nvidia promised at one point, and 2) eventually the Nvidia binary blob driver stopped supporting it, and eventually the old binary blob no longer ran on newer kernels due to changing APIs. Open source drivers make it a lot easier for somebody to support the hardware if they care about it enough for a very long time. This is one of the main reasons why I kind of refuse to buy an Nvidia GPU now. I just wish GPGPU support was better on AMD platforms (though this seems to be improving?)
I actually have one of these in an ancient box used for data recovery from old drives.
And yet my r9 380 has no signal through dvi
Not for long, though, at least for the current development branch (or did they already drop it?)