20 years later, ATI R300 GPUs receive new Linux drivers

According to the portal PhoronixThe ATI Radeon R300, R400, and R500 graphics cards are getting a new open source Linux driver that will give these nearly 20-year-old GPUs a little extra life. The new driver was created by developer Emma Anholt and is designed to give these GPUs the ability to request NIR shaders from Mesa’s 3D graphics library health tracker and use the NIR path to TGSI.

NIR is a set of optimized build libraries found in the core of the compilers of shaders of the Mesa drivers. It’s basically an optimization layer that tries to reduce the amount of work a GPU has to do when running 3D applications.

This means that these older graphics cards will increase their gaming performance and load times will be faster. But with the age of these cards, don’t expect to play the latest titles at a playable frame rate due to the nearly 20-year-old hardware limitations of these cards. But for people who have older games, this new driver should provide a good boost to the overall GPU performance.

Someone do you have one of these cards? MMM

To demonstrate the age of these GPUs, the R500 graphics cards, also called the X1000 series, were released in 2007 and manufactured using a 90nm process. Light years away from what exists in the current market, where the best graphics cards, such as the RTX 3090, can achieve more than 35 TFlops.

There is a possibility to restrict the NIR to only the R500 series of ATI graphics cards, as the R300 and R400 cards are more limited in hardware. Although this is not confirmed and it is only an idea that is being discussed at the moment.

Anholt hopes to release this driver when Mesa 22.0 is released, but additional testing from the community is needed to ensure the driver is stable.