Mesa developers consider branching off some older GPU drivers - including AMD R300/R600
Posted by Fcking_Chuck@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 29 comments
Kitayama_8k@reddit
Wow, that's crazy that literal 20+ year old ATI cards are still supported by main branch mesa.
MasterJeebus@reddit
I think its awesome that they still support them. Some people have old pcs they use for retro gaming with XP and dual boot with linux. The R300 covers the ATI 95xx and 98xx gpus that came out with DX9.
j0seplinux@reddit
And then there's Nvidia dropping support for GPUs that are less than 10 years old.
Kitayama_8k@reddit
That's a bit of a disingenuous phrasing. The 10 series was release 10 years ago, with the 1080ti releasing 9 years ago. So they pretty much did provide 10 years of support for pascal. AFAIK old drivers can still be installed, especially on windows, to make those cards keep working for years to come as well, just maybe not so much with new games.
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
oh they did? I know the card they dropped of mine was at least 10 years old :)
RealModeX86@reddit
troy0h@reddit
r300 and r600 are almost 2 decades old at this point, i doubt anyone is really using them anymore anyway
CHAOSHACKER@reddit
To be fair, the last chips using the R600 driver were still sold up to 2014
samuerusama@reddit
R5 310 released in 2015, it uses the R600 driver.
CHAOSHACKER@reddit
Even newer then. My point
samuerusama@reddit
AMD sold terascale hardware up to 2015, so it is actually closer to 1 decade old.
I know a few people with such hardware. I already tried to remove the
r600driver only to get a bug report about it.troy0h@reddit
i thought r600 was only terascale 1, not further lol
lazyboy76@reddit
Just let them have the cake. If they can support hardware from a million years ago then what harm?
OCPetrus@reddit
Imagine you clean up some code and then the CI system tells you you broke the driver on hardware from 2002. What great fun that must be.
troy0h@reddit
I just mean I see why they're considering it, it's like how they dropped support for 486 CPUs, who's even using them anymore
Win_DVD@reddit
Well I could see it for old embedded equipment or old enterprise stuff, but even still it being branched off wouldn't harm much in these cases lol
ParanoidFactoid@reddit
That will hit RX580 and Vega cards. Lots of them still in use.
ouyawei@reddit
Huh? Those are GCN cards that use amdgpu
ilep@reddit
No, I think they refer to older chips made by ATI. The numbering/naming just is confusing.
pastelfemby@reddit
This is about the 21+ year old GPUs... not the RX ones from like 8 years ago.
CHAOSHACKER@reddit
Not necessarily, R600 is the driver used for all TeraScale chips, the last one of those were released in 2013 in the Richland series of chips
ParanoidFactoid@reddit
I believe nv30 and nv50 refer to rx-580 and Vega respectively.
dovahshy15@reddit
nv30 and nv50 are Nvidia GPUs codenames: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html
ParanoidFactoid@reddit
Yeah, good link. You're right. My error. Thank you.
Ezmiller_2@reddit
So what does this mean for a 580x user?
SystemAxis@reddit
Seems reasonable. Splitting old drivers out keeps Mesa cleaner without fully dropping support.
Liarus_@reddit
Seems alright to me
tonymurray@reddit
These drivers served me well. Time to take them out behind the shed. 🥹
Bathroom_Humor@reddit
I don't think this is an issue. Not like they are removing the drivers or no longer updating them at all. Now if it were like AMD branching off 2 generation old GPU drivers to give them fewer feature and game updates, that'd be an issue.