The Old ATI R300 Open-Source Driver Sees Improvements For OpenGL, WineD3D Apps/Games

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Old ATI R300 Open-Source Driver Sees Improvements For OpenGL, WineD3D Apps/Games

Thanks to the driver being open-source, the ATI (AMD) R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa is still seeing new (occasional) optimizations for Radeon graphics cards launched nearly two decades ago...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/R300-Gallium3D-2023-Improvement

[Linuxhippy]

The R300g driver started in the years after that point when the ATI open-source graphics effort was mostly reverse-engineering affair by the community and prior to AMD starting what would become their well-regarded graphics driver open-source strategy.

I still remember Michael re-iterating over and over again how useless the open-source drivers are back in these days.
However these drivers built the foundation of where we stand today (not so much in terms of code, but in terms of preassure).

[stormcrow]

I still remember Michael re-iterating over and over again how useless the open-source drivers are back in these days.
However these drivers built the foundation of where we stand today (not so much in terms of code, but in terms of preassure).

Ugh, boy were they and the proprietary ATI ones weren't much better.

[johanb]

Ugh, boy were they and the proprietary ATI ones weren't much better.

I did not use Linux during the x300 days, but still remember that when I used the 4000-series you had to decide if you wanted a non-tearing, bug-free and smooth desktop experience (mesa) or playable games (catalyst).
I was constantly switching between the two drivers, but got tired of it after a few years and switched to nvidia 750ti which was at least slightly better.
I'm so incredibly grateful for the modern AMD drivers today, they're simply phenomenal!

[Melcar]

Ah yes, the days of "if you want good 2d performance and a usable Linux desktop use mesa, if you want to play games or spin a silly desktop cube in 3d use fglrx (after you attempt to install and fail 10+ times)". Good times. I wish I still had some R300 class hardware, just to test how good the driver is now.

[Eirikr1848]

Older friend of mine plays Sim City 3000 on ArchLinux32 via Radeon 9600 Mobility.

this will keep the old gamer gaming!

[smitty3268]

Not to be a downer, but my understanding is that this is largely to mitigate performance regressions that came about recently when they dropped the TGSI backend and switched to NIR. So it's nice to get some improvements, but I think it's still slower than it was before in certain cases.

[Paulie889]

I think it's still slower than it was before in certain cases.

It should not be slower, and I'll be happy to look at performance regression or any other bug reports (in a fdo gitlab issue).

But yes, don't expect any extra FPS from the recent changes (at least in games) and most of recent r300 work was to clean up after the major mesa changes. IMO the r300 driver was working quite OK since early 2010s thanks to work of Marek Olšák (and Tom Stellard for the compiler and other guys before). It was not maintained much in the later part of 2010s, but mesa core was mostly stable by than and so regressions were rare. However around 2020 work started on removing old drivers and moving from TGSI to NIR and while Emma Anholt did most of the heavy part, lot of r300 driver issues were uncovered so there was some need for fixups.

FWIW the GPUs (especially the R500 ones) are still able to run recent DEs quite OK (well not at 4k, but full HD is fine), but its mostly the CPUs from that era that are not doing too OK today for normal work (and also considering how much memory went into the computers back than).

[dekkzz78]

my debian t60p with a x1400 is not noticeably slower than a 2 year old laptop doing normal office duty except playing videos in modern browsers & websites chock full of JS, using qutebrowser + mpv its not a problem. any increase in performance will be welcome.

[Nille_kungen]

my debian t60p with a x1400 is not noticeably slower than a 2 year old laptop doing normal office duty except playing videos in modern browsers & websites chock full of JS, using qutebrowser + mpv its not a problem. any increase in performance will be welcome.

I remember that t60 was fast and snappy until you wanted to play youtube videos with a resolution over 480p but maybe it was after the blob dropped support.
t60 was great hardware at the time in a quality laptop chassis.