Mesa "Terakan" Driver Aims To Provide Vulkan Support For Old Radeon HD 6000 Series

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa "Terakan" Driver Aims To Provide Vulkan Support For Old Radeon HD 6000 Series

There's a new open-source Vulkan driver in development by an independent developer that is working on providing support for aging Radeon HD 6000 series "Northern Islands" graphics processors...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Terakan-R600-Vulkan-Driver

[siyia]

Nice i still use an HD6950 to this day!!!!!

[M@GOid]

Oh yeah, the HD 6950, back when I was able to afford a (near) top of the line GPU bellow 400 dollars. Today not only my currency worth half (compared to Dollar) of what it was 10 years ago, but a equivalent model today is above 800 dollars. This kind of shenanigans made me abandon the "PC Master Race" lifestyle, and focus more on indie games that can run on a APU, although I still got a cheap discrete card for a bit more "umpf" on some "not-so-indie" games.

[kiffmet]

Aww nice. A Radeon HD 6950 or 6970 for sure got quite some use left in them. 2.2GFLOPs and 2.7GFLOPs of raw FP32 is still enough for entry level tasks nowadays. According to anandtech, these chips can also do asynchronous compute dispatches, aswell as tesselation. Some more modern API features can probably be emulated. This development is very interesting and I'm curious about what's possible with these old cards.

[chithanh]

Cayman GPUs of the HD 6000 series line-up or ultimately ends up working out well for additional pre-GCN GPUs.

I think Cayman and the VLIW4 APUs (Kabini/Richland) may be possible, but everything older is questionable. There is an older comment by Dave Airlie on this:

I think you could to Vulkan on CAYMAN, but I don't think evergreen could (at least I don't think the virtual memory hw is up to how you'd want to do it).

[aviallon]

That is awesome!!! I was dreaming of this for ages!
There are lots of older games which would be awesome on Linux if ran using DXVK.
Starcraft 2 for instance.

If the developer needs any funding, I'd be happy to pay him a coffee per month!

[evasb]

It is heroes like this that make FOSS great.

[Eirikr1848]

Aaaaaaaaaaand they said it could never be done. What a start, though! Baby steps. But he seems to be making quite rapid progress and has a roadmap and plan in place to overcome potential hurdles.

[tildearrow]

I was hoping they woild call it Tulkan...

[WiR3D]

And that's while wrapping up this monstrous mesa PR

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/22250