10 ms·

AMD's 22 year old GPUs are still getting updates

292 points by titaniumtown 3y ago

anotherhue 3y ago
ATI GPUs technically https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R300_series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R300_series OSS wins again I think. I had one of these, a fancy red 9700 Pro that I remember playing Max Payne, JK2 and FarCry on. Specs https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-9700-pro.c50 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-9700-pro.c50
- anthk 3y ago
  I still have one, I can't remember if it was an r300 or r600. Radeon X1200, a laptop.
- dgfitz 3y ago
  I had one of those as well, with the 75ohms tv connector and everything, first PC build in highschool. The tuner didn't work as well as just watching tv, but the novelty of it was pretty neat. Bear in mind, this was long before people had a TV in every room.
  - Grazester 3y ago
    It was 2002 I think we were at that era by then.
- amlib 3y ago
  I remember drooling over this card and half-life 2, while all I had was a voodoo 3. It took me so long to upgrade my computer that by the time I did this series of cards was already two or more generations too old, and in the end I opted for some newer nvidia card. But alas, I finally could play Valve's masterpiece lol
Vvector 3y ago
More accurate headline: open source software gets updates to support 22 year old AMD GPUs.
- phkahler 3y ago
  No, the old GPUs were already supported. The performance is still being improved now.
  - dark-star 3y ago
    yes, but not by AMD, but the community. Lots of 20+ year old community projects still get feature- or performance-updates these days. However, finding a vendor who would do that will prove to be an impossible task
    - atq2119 3y ago
      At some point you have to accept that a 20 year old GPU(!) just isn't interesting for anything other than historical and nerd-sniping purposes. That said, I'm sure you could pay Collabora or some shop like it to implement any features for these old drivers that you really care about.
      - dark-star 3y ago
        oh, definitely. Everyone who still uses these GPUs probably doesn't require "more speed" (or they would have upgraded already) However, as long as people have fun fixing (and testing) new features or improvements to these old drivers, why not?
- szatkus 3y ago
  Yeah, I looked up the author and the changes were comitted from a gmail account. The official contibution from AMD would be made from an account with amd.com domain.
  - JonChesterfield 3y ago
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
A bit of a misleading title, considering that AMD officially stopped updating drivers for Vega GPUs which are still being sold in products today(!) based on Ryzen 5000 APUs. They'll only see security updates. So I have mixed feeling on AMDs update support periods. OSS drivers and community dev effort is a different thing from the manufacturer's own efforts and should be mentioned as such. Edit: @downvoters, would you mind explaining please? Not that I care what you do, I'm just curious on your logic. Thanks
- mouse_ 3y ago
  I have to respect for AMD for at the very least following the standards they helped create, unlike Nvidia. That makes things like this possible.
- pdpi 3y ago
  This is definitely something the OSS community deserves most of the praise for, but, AIUI, the overall quality of the radeon drivers is only possible because AMD has a pretty good history around giving the community the specs to work with, so they definitely deserve credit there.
- ho_schi 3y ago
  1. Doesn’t apply to Linux. 2. Probably also doesn’t apply to Windows[1][2]. Please correct me if I missed something. [1] https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/product-and-os-support-update-for-radeon-software-adrenalin-21-6/ba-p/477423 https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/product-and-os-support-u... [2] https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/product-and-os-support-update-for-radeon-software-adrenalin-21-6/ba-p/477423 https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/product-and-os-support-u...
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    Your links are from 2021. :-(
  - ZekeSulastin 3y ago
    AMD split off Polaris and Vega drivers last September; official ROCm support ended earlier but afaik you can still run ROCm on Vega? Similarly worrisome for gamers is aging architectural features as devs catch up to hardware, i.e. mesh shaders in Alan Wake 2 supported in Turing+ and RDNA2+. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21126/amd-reduces-ongoing-driver-support-for-polaris-and-vega-gpus https://www.anandtech.com/show/21126/amd-reduces-ongoing-dri...
andy_ppp 3y ago
I think drivers should be compulsory to open source 5 years after the hardware is no longer sold, it’d be so good for consumers and make hardware last a lot longer. I’d include things like digital cameras and printers in this revolution. In a lot of cases it might be better using older hardware as new features would be added by the community forever!
- ho_schi 3y ago
  Why five years? Modules (precisely speaking about Linux) shall be open-source upon sale! Nothing new for AMD and Intel. But we have likely a new field below, firmware. Nvidia (and both from above) push a lot of stuff there now. Firmware often contains security and bugfixes nowadays. PS: Hoping right now that the newest firmware for RDNA2 fixes issues with PSR (backlight turns off).
  - mlyle 3y ago
    > Modules (precisely speaking about Linux) shall be open-source upon sale! Linux's interpretation of the GPL allows closed source and proprietary modules (providing you conform to a somewhat limited set of interfaces). There's a lot of closed source binary lumps out there for different hardware.
    - teddyh 3y ago
      > Linux's interpretation of the GPL allows closed source and proprietary modules Not officially, IIUC. If they were officially allowed, this is what would happen: <https://lwn.net/Articles/162686/ https://lwn.net/Articles/162686/>
      - mlyle 3y ago
        http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.... Linus said it was okay long ago; that's as close to official as one can get. Later his views became more nuanced, but still largely authorize binary-only drivers. It may still be legally problematic (as there are many contributors who may be able to make a claim); but 28 years of policy precedent make such an attempt at enforcement difficult. There's all the EXPORT_SYMBOL/EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL infrastructure for this exact reason.
pmontra 3y ago
So maybe my old laptop from 2006 will get a kernel with MESA support for its old ATI x1600, which is based on R520. I couldn't update it past some 3.x kernel because anything newer would not draw the display or lose sync, I can't remember which one. That happened about in 2013. However the nail in the coffin was the 4GB limit on RAM and too many VMs and containers.
superkuh 3y ago
Maybe for some things. But AMD dropped support for compute (ROCm) for it's RX 580 card after just under 4 years. And there are no open source drivers for compute.
- ColonelPhantom 3y ago
  > And there are no open source drivers for compute. Well, technically ROCm is open source (although it comes across more as a "dump source code releases every now and then" to me.) Also, the link is from the Mesa project, which is working on an OpenCL frontend to the driver called rusticl. It's not yet stable or enabled by default, but if you get a build of it, you can try setting the environment variable `RUSTICL_ENABLE=radeonsi` and it should sort-of work (on any Radeon HD 7000 or Radeon R7/R9/RX GPU!) iirc the rusticl developers are even hoping/planning to get HIP (via chipStar) and SYCL (via Intel's compiler) working on top of rusticl.
  - atq2119 3y ago
    I mean, the HIP compiler is built on LLVM and AMD-specific development happens directly upstream, which is more than you can say for other vendors. Other parts of the overall ROCm system are in a worse place, admittedly. For some reason, AMD doesn't seem to understand the principles of open development.
- slavik81 3y ago
  The open-source AMDGPU KFD driver in the Linux kernel supports compute, including with the RX 580 (Polaris). It's true that AMD dropped official support for that hardware and has been closing Polaris-specific bugs as wont-fix. The last ROCm release that AMD validated on Polaris hardware was ROCm 3.5 (June 2020). I've packaged the test suites of the ROCm math libraries for Debian Trixie and have personally donated a selection of Fiji and Polaris hardware for the Debian AI Team's CI. It's beyond my abilities to fix everything wrong on old hardware, but I'm hoping that having publicly accessible test logs will at least help people to understand what works and what doesn't. Of course, it always helps if the community contributes. Debian would certainly be interested in bug reports and patches for Polaris. Users with hardware no longer supported by AMD may find it easier to work with their distro package maintainers than with AMD directly.
kijnh23uihUI3 3y ago
Microsoft also still sometimes provide updates for > 20 years old Windows XP, while Apple stop providing security updates only after a few years, which is a shame.
- _chu1 3y ago
  I never thought Mac OS releases were planned for longevity after they started being free, more like point releases. You were expected to upgrade and if you didn't, Apple doesn't care if you had a valid reason to stay (PPC Rosetta, i386 compatibility), just upgrade. Windows releases on the other hand can last up to 13 years and even longer, there are forums for modern day XP users and even ports of modern browsers.
- goalieca 3y ago
  Apple provides about 10 years on computers and 7 years on devices. WindowsXP provided about 8 years of mainstream support. They offered extended support to business for 13 years for a premium but even that has expired. They will soon stop supporting computers without tpm 2 on windows 11.
KronisLV 3y ago
I recently had issues with AMD's RX580 GPU, where the latest drivers would cause issues for me when trying to run VR games with an Oculus Quest (either SteamVR or the Meta OpenXR implementation). I'd play the game for about 10-40 minutes and then it would crash, the drivers would reset, the screen would go black in the middle for a bit and the OS would make an attempt to recover (which didn't always work). In the end, turns out that the version of AMD Software and their included drivers from 2023 didn't work and I had to revert to an older version. I ended up going for their 2020 AMD Pro drivers and software because the card is from 2018 and the improvement was immediate - I haven't had a single crash since, whereas previously I could reproduce it 100% of the time, with only the time before the crash varying. Note: this is on Windows 10, which I boot into for gaming, though I actually like their AMD Software which feels a bit better than CoreCtrl on Linux distros. Some people suggested that 2022 drivers/software would also work, but this is one of those cases where the hardware technically gets updates, but they actually make things worse, perhaps because the older hardware is not tested against as much, especially with newer games and programs. I don't necessarily expect anyone to care that much about hardware from 2018, it was just an interesting case of things going wrong. Overall, I like AMD because they're affordable (still running a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU on my main workstation and it does everything I need) and decent, and perhaps the driver situation on Linux is a bit better than Nvidia's, but then again I also like Intel's attempts with Arc, except that Nvidia still wins out because of CUDA for a lot of workloads (I never managed to get ROCm working locally well for running LLM's and DKIM kicked my butt, needing to compile stuff after every apt upgrade). Oh well, here's hoping that we keep getting lots of options for hardware, software and that the market competition stays alive and well, so I can enjoy affordable last gen options with most of the issues patched out a few years down the line as well, when I decide to upgrade on the cheap. But also even in regards to entertainment like gaming things are getting better thanks to Proton. I look forwards to the day when I can 100% switch over to Linux. My homelab servers already run Debian/Ubuntu with AMDs 200GE CPUs, which I got for dirt cheap and which have relatively low TDP (35W) while still giving me access to x86, which I can passively cool.
elzbardico 3y ago
What I think incredible, is that 20 years CPUs may not be able to run the latest client software but are still powerful enough for a lot of tasks. You probably don't need anything more fancy than this to a lot of industrial machinery for example.
- google234123 3y ago
  Or you could use a arm chip that consumes 100 times less power
M95D 3y ago
22 year old GPU support improved. Good. Very good! Now, how about making mesa not freeze the driver, crash and panic the kernel on just 10 year old gpus? https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85421 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85421
- anthk 3y ago
  By just using EXA instead of Glamor it just works.
badsectoracula 3y ago
From the comment, it seems to also improve R500, which is ATI's X1000 series. I have an Athlon64 with a X1950 Pro (i bought that PC in late 2003, it had a GeForceFX but later upgraded it to the X1950 Pro) and i planned on trying Linux and see how it performs.
- ColonelPhantom 3y ago
  Yeah, just like the R600 driver supports HD 2000 through HD 6000 hardware ('Terascale'), basically any Radeon HD except HD 7000. And radeonsi originally meant "Southern Islands" aka HD 7000 (and parts of the Rx 200/Rx 300 lineup) but it works on all GCN and RDNA cards.
anigbrowl 3y ago
An odd thing to me about the GPU space is how rapidly many ML libraries that rely on CUDA deprecate earlier versions. Two years ago I bought a used workstation laptop with (iirc) a Kepler GPU, and I was surprised to find that virtually none of the popular Python libraries would run on it. I spent a whole day stepping back through earlier library versions which of course created other kinds of dependency problems before giving up in favor of an external GPU. I wasn't trying to do anything difficult, I was literally at the 'hello GPU world' stage and wanting to try out some very basic exercises from books. Can't help feeling that Nvidia is doing a lot of the groundwork with CUDA and some library maintainers are just surfing on it.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  That's because newer GPUs support newer instructions sets. Like AVX, AVX2, AVX512, but basically a new set every year instead of every 10 years like in CPU land. And it's not just about speed, they provide new functionality. So at some point supporting older GPUs significantly slows down those who have the newer GPUs. The next architecture after Kepler, Pascal, added huge new capabilities, that's why nobody supports Kepler anymore, it's too limited. > wanting to try out some very basic exercises Should be possible to do that with an older Python (3.5?) and associated libraries. Versions around 2016 should work.
  - rahimnathwani 3y ago
    I seem to recall ~6 years ago I had to recompile an ML library because my CPU didn’t support AVX2. So even though the release binaries required AVX2, the source code was written in a way that it could work without it. I wonder whether this required specific effort by the developers of that library, or whether it was taken care of by some underlying tooling? Can you write CUDA code today that uses the latest features but can be compiled for older cards as well?
- google234123 3y ago
  Deprecating support for a 10-12 year old gpu doesn’t seem rapid to me
andrewstuart 3y ago
What are the facts about how long AMD provides drivers for? Nvidia provide drivers for what feels like a VERY long time. I have the feeling that AMD gives up on providing drivers after only a few years of product life. But these are only hunches, anyone know the facts?
apsec112 3y ago
I am... confused? My old PC has an X1800 XT, which is significantly more recent than that, and the Linux driver hasn't been updated since 2009. I don't think that driver even works with modern X.Org or Linux kernels. Could someone tell me if I'm missing something? Would be very happy to be able to run this card at full resolution, instead of having to use a generic VGA driver. https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/legacy-graphics/ati-radeon-x-series/ati-radeon-x1xxx-series https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/legacy-graphics/ati-...
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Your link is for the proprietary driver, this link is for the open source driver (not AMD themselves providing updates). X1800 XT is R500 so should be supported by the open radeon driver just fine, including output and modesetting https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/ https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
SubiculumCode 3y ago
AMD is a showcase for why competition is good for consumers. I have little doubt that had AMD spent the last 30 years as the pc chip leader, it would have turned to all the exploitive and anti-consumer practices of intel and nvidia. Dominant market leaders tend to lock down their position, while those who are not, must innovate and build relationships with consumers by other means, including support, or open drivers. I'm just riffing, but it seems to me a reoccurring theme, and one fresh in my mind as I try to migrate from Windows to Ubuntu Budgie, but their lock down of Office and Windows means I must run an unwieldy full VM.
mugivarra69 3y ago
alex deutcher. google it.
itsTyrion 3y ago
why though

292 points by titaniumtown 3y ago

ATI GPUs technically https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R300_series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R300_series OSS wins again I think. I had one of these, a fancy red 9700 Pro that I remember playing Max Payne, JK2 and FarCry on. Specs https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-9700-pro.c50 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-9700-pro.c50

anthk 3y ago
I still have one, I can't remember if it was an r300 or r600. Radeon X1200, a laptop.
dgfitz 3y ago
I had one of those as well, with the 75ohms tv connector and everything, first PC build in highschool. The tuner didn't work as well as just watching tv, but the novelty of it was pretty neat. Bear in mind, this was long before people had a TV in every room.
- Grazester 3y ago
  It was 2002 I think we were at that era by then.
amlib 3y ago
I remember drooling over this card and half-life 2, while all I had was a voodoo 3. It took me so long to upgrade my computer that by the time I did this series of cards was already two or more generations too old, and in the end I opted for some newer nvidia card. But alas, I finally could play Valve's masterpiece lol

Vvector 3y ago

More accurate headline: open source software gets updates to support 22 year old AMD GPUs.

phkahler 3y ago
No, the old GPUs were already supported. The performance is still being improved now.
- dark-star 3y ago
  yes, but not by AMD, but the community. Lots of 20+ year old community projects still get feature- or performance-updates these days. However, finding a vendor who would do that will prove to be an impossible task
  - atq2119 3y ago
    At some point you have to accept that a 20 year old GPU(!) just isn't interesting for anything other than historical and nerd-sniping purposes. That said, I'm sure you could pay Collabora or some shop like it to implement any features for these old drivers that you really care about.
    - dark-star 3y ago
      oh, definitely. Everyone who still uses these GPUs probably doesn't require "more speed" (or they would have upgraded already) However, as long as people have fun fixing (and testing) new features or improvements to these old drivers, why not?
szatkus 3y ago
Yeah, I looked up the author and the changes were comitted from a gmail account. The official contibution from AMD would be made from an account with amd.com domain.
- JonChesterfield 3y ago

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

A bit of a misleading title, considering that AMD officially stopped updating drivers for Vega GPUs which are still being sold in products today(!) based on Ryzen 5000 APUs. They'll only see security updates. So I have mixed feeling on AMDs update support periods. OSS drivers and community dev effort is a different thing from the manufacturer's own efforts and should be mentioned as such. Edit: @downvoters, would you mind explaining please? Not that I care what you do, I'm just curious on your logic. Thanks

mouse_ 3y ago
I have to respect for AMD for at the very least following the standards they helped create, unlike Nvidia. That makes things like this possible.
pdpi 3y ago
This is definitely something the OSS community deserves most of the praise for, but, AIUI, the overall quality of the radeon drivers is only possible because AMD has a pretty good history around giving the community the specs to work with, so they definitely deserve credit there.
ho_schi 3y ago
1. Doesn’t apply to Linux. 2. Probably also doesn’t apply to Windows[1][2]. Please correct me if I missed something. [1] https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/product-and-os-support-update-for-radeon-software-adrenalin-21-6/ba-p/477423 https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/product-and-os-support-u... [2] https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/product-and-os-support-update-for-radeon-software-adrenalin-21-6/ba-p/477423 https://community.amd.com/t5/gaming/product-and-os-support-u...
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  Your links are from 2021. :-(
- ZekeSulastin 3y ago
  AMD split off Polaris and Vega drivers last September; official ROCm support ended earlier but afaik you can still run ROCm on Vega? Similarly worrisome for gamers is aging architectural features as devs catch up to hardware, i.e. mesh shaders in Alan Wake 2 supported in Turing+ and RDNA2+. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21126/amd-reduces-ongoing-driver-support-for-polaris-and-vega-gpus https://www.anandtech.com/show/21126/amd-reduces-ongoing-dri...

andy_ppp 3y ago

I think drivers should be compulsory to open source 5 years after the hardware is no longer sold, it’d be so good for consumers and make hardware last a lot longer. I’d include things like digital cameras and printers in this revolution. In a lot of cases it might be better using older hardware as new features would be added by the community forever!

ho_schi 3y ago
Why five years? Modules (precisely speaking about Linux) shall be open-source upon sale! Nothing new for AMD and Intel. But we have likely a new field below, firmware. Nvidia (and both from above) push a lot of stuff there now. Firmware often contains security and bugfixes nowadays. PS: Hoping right now that the newest firmware for RDNA2 fixes issues with PSR (backlight turns off).
- mlyle 3y ago
  > Modules (precisely speaking about Linux) shall be open-source upon sale! Linux's interpretation of the GPL allows closed source and proprietary modules (providing you conform to a somewhat limited set of interfaces). There's a lot of closed source binary lumps out there for different hardware.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    > Linux's interpretation of the GPL allows closed source and proprietary modules Not officially, IIUC. If they were officially allowed, this is what would happen: <https://lwn.net/Articles/162686/ https://lwn.net/Articles/162686/>
    - mlyle 3y ago
      http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.... Linus said it was okay long ago; that's as close to official as one can get. Later his views became more nuanced, but still largely authorize binary-only drivers. It may still be legally problematic (as there are many contributors who may be able to make a claim); but 28 years of policy precedent make such an attempt at enforcement difficult. There's all the EXPORT_SYMBOL/EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL infrastructure for this exact reason.

pmontra 3y ago

So maybe my old laptop from 2006 will get a kernel with MESA support for its old ATI x1600, which is based on R520. I couldn't update it past some 3.x kernel because anything newer would not draw the display or lose sync, I can't remember which one. That happened about in 2013. However the nail in the coffin was the 4GB limit on RAM and too many VMs and containers.

superkuh 3y ago

Maybe for some things. But AMD dropped support for compute (ROCm) for it's RX 580 card after just under 4 years. And there are no open source drivers for compute.

ColonelPhantom 3y ago
> And there are no open source drivers for compute. Well, technically ROCm is open source (although it comes across more as a "dump source code releases every now and then" to me.) Also, the link is from the Mesa project, which is working on an OpenCL frontend to the driver called rusticl. It's not yet stable or enabled by default, but if you get a build of it, you can try setting the environment variable `RUSTICL_ENABLE=radeonsi` and it should sort-of work (on any Radeon HD 7000 or Radeon R7/R9/RX GPU!) iirc the rusticl developers are even hoping/planning to get HIP (via chipStar) and SYCL (via Intel's compiler) working on top of rusticl.
- atq2119 3y ago
  I mean, the HIP compiler is built on LLVM and AMD-specific development happens directly upstream, which is more than you can say for other vendors. Other parts of the overall ROCm system are in a worse place, admittedly. For some reason, AMD doesn't seem to understand the principles of open development.
slavik81 3y ago
The open-source AMDGPU KFD driver in the Linux kernel supports compute, including with the RX 580 (Polaris). It's true that AMD dropped official support for that hardware and has been closing Polaris-specific bugs as wont-fix. The last ROCm release that AMD validated on Polaris hardware was ROCm 3.5 (June 2020). I've packaged the test suites of the ROCm math libraries for Debian Trixie and have personally donated a selection of Fiji and Polaris hardware for the Debian AI Team's CI. It's beyond my abilities to fix everything wrong on old hardware, but I'm hoping that having publicly accessible test logs will at least help people to understand what works and what doesn't. Of course, it always helps if the community contributes. Debian would certainly be interested in bug reports and patches for Polaris. Users with hardware no longer supported by AMD may find it easier to work with their distro package maintainers than with AMD directly.

kijnh23uihUI3 3y ago

Microsoft also still sometimes provide updates for > 20 years old Windows XP, while Apple stop providing security updates only after a few years, which is a shame.

_chu1 3y ago
I never thought Mac OS releases were planned for longevity after they started being free, more like point releases. You were expected to upgrade and if you didn't, Apple doesn't care if you had a valid reason to stay (PPC Rosetta, i386 compatibility), just upgrade. Windows releases on the other hand can last up to 13 years and even longer, there are forums for modern day XP users and even ports of modern browsers.
goalieca 3y ago
Apple provides about 10 years on computers and 7 years on devices. WindowsXP provided about 8 years of mainstream support. They offered extended support to business for 13 years for a premium but even that has expired. They will soon stop supporting computers without tpm 2 on windows 11.

KronisLV 3y ago

I recently had issues with AMD's RX580 GPU, where the latest drivers would cause issues for me when trying to run VR games with an Oculus Quest (either SteamVR or the Meta OpenXR implementation). I'd play the game for about 10-40 minutes and then it would crash, the drivers would reset, the screen would go black in the middle for a bit and the OS would make an attempt to recover (which didn't always work). In the end, turns out that the version of AMD Software and their included drivers from 2023 didn't work and I had to revert to an older version. I ended up going for their 2020 AMD Pro drivers and software because the card is from 2018 and the improvement was immediate - I haven't had a single crash since, whereas previously I could reproduce it 100% of the time, with only the time before the crash varying. Note: this is on Windows 10, which I boot into for gaming, though I actually like their AMD Software which feels a bit better than CoreCtrl on Linux distros. Some people suggested that 2022 drivers/software would also work, but this is one of those cases where the hardware technically gets updates, but they actually make things worse, perhaps because the older hardware is not tested against as much, especially with newer games and programs. I don't necessarily expect anyone to care that much about hardware from 2018, it was just an interesting case of things going wrong. Overall, I like AMD because they're affordable (still running a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU on my main workstation and it does everything I need) and decent, and perhaps the driver situation on Linux is a bit better than Nvidia's, but then again I also like Intel's attempts with Arc, except that Nvidia still wins out because of CUDA for a lot of workloads (I never managed to get ROCm working locally well for running LLM's and DKIM kicked my butt, needing to compile stuff after every apt upgrade). Oh well, here's hoping that we keep getting lots of options for hardware, software and that the market competition stays alive and well, so I can enjoy affordable last gen options with most of the issues patched out a few years down the line as well, when I decide to upgrade on the cheap. But also even in regards to entertainment like gaming things are getting better thanks to Proton. I look forwards to the day when I can 100% switch over to Linux. My homelab servers already run Debian/Ubuntu with AMDs 200GE CPUs, which I got for dirt cheap and which have relatively low TDP (35W) while still giving me access to x86, which I can passively cool.

elzbardico 3y ago

What I think incredible, is that 20 years CPUs may not be able to run the latest client software but are still powerful enough for a lot of tasks. You probably don't need anything more fancy than this to a lot of industrial machinery for example.

google234123 3y ago
Or you could use a arm chip that consumes 100 times less power

M95D 3y ago

22 year old GPU support improved. Good. Very good! Now, how about making mesa not freeze the driver, crash and panic the kernel on just 10 year old gpus? https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85421 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85421

anthk 3y ago
By just using EXA instead of Glamor it just works.

badsectoracula 3y ago

From the comment, it seems to also improve R500, which is ATI's X1000 series. I have an Athlon64 with a X1950 Pro (i bought that PC in late 2003, it had a GeForceFX but later upgraded it to the X1950 Pro) and i planned on trying Linux and see how it performs.

ColonelPhantom 3y ago
Yeah, just like the R600 driver supports HD 2000 through HD 6000 hardware ('Terascale'), basically any Radeon HD except HD 7000. And radeonsi originally meant "Southern Islands" aka HD 7000 (and parts of the Rx 200/Rx 300 lineup) but it works on all GCN and RDNA cards.

anigbrowl 3y ago

An odd thing to me about the GPU space is how rapidly many ML libraries that rely on CUDA deprecate earlier versions. Two years ago I bought a used workstation laptop with (iirc) a Kepler GPU, and I was surprised to find that virtually none of the popular Python libraries would run on it. I spent a whole day stepping back through earlier library versions which of course created other kinds of dependency problems before giving up in favor of an external GPU. I wasn't trying to do anything difficult, I was literally at the 'hello GPU world' stage and wanting to try out some very basic exercises from books. Can't help feeling that Nvidia is doing a lot of the groundwork with CUDA and some library maintainers are just surfing on it.

dist-epoch 3y ago
That's because newer GPUs support newer instructions sets. Like AVX, AVX2, AVX512, but basically a new set every year instead of every 10 years like in CPU land. And it's not just about speed, they provide new functionality. So at some point supporting older GPUs significantly slows down those who have the newer GPUs. The next architecture after Kepler, Pascal, added huge new capabilities, that's why nobody supports Kepler anymore, it's too limited. > wanting to try out some very basic exercises Should be possible to do that with an older Python (3.5?) and associated libraries. Versions around 2016 should work.
- rahimnathwani 3y ago
  I seem to recall ~6 years ago I had to recompile an ML library because my CPU didn’t support AVX2. So even though the release binaries required AVX2, the source code was written in a way that it could work without it. I wonder whether this required specific effort by the developers of that library, or whether it was taken care of by some underlying tooling? Can you write CUDA code today that uses the latest features but can be compiled for older cards as well?
google234123 3y ago
Deprecating support for a 10-12 year old gpu doesn’t seem rapid to me

andrewstuart 3y ago

What are the facts about how long AMD provides drivers for? Nvidia provide drivers for what feels like a VERY long time. I have the feeling that AMD gives up on providing drivers after only a few years of product life. But these are only hunches, anyone know the facts?

apsec112 3y ago

I am... confused? My old PC has an X1800 XT, which is significantly more recent than that, and the Linux driver hasn't been updated since 2009. I don't think that driver even works with modern X.Org or Linux kernels. Could someone tell me if I'm missing something? Would be very happy to be able to run this card at full resolution, instead of having to use a generic VGA driver. https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/legacy-graphics/ati-radeon-x-series/ati-radeon-x1xxx-series https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/legacy-graphics/ati-...

zamadatix 3y ago
Your link is for the proprietary driver, this link is for the open source driver (not AMD themselves providing updates). X1800 XT is R500 so should be supported by the open radeon driver just fine, including output and modesetting https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/ https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/
deleted 3y ago
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SubiculumCode 3y ago

AMD is a showcase for why competition is good for consumers. I have little doubt that had AMD spent the last 30 years as the pc chip leader, it would have turned to all the exploitive and anti-consumer practices of intel and nvidia. Dominant market leaders tend to lock down their position, while those who are not, must innovate and build relationships with consumers by other means, including support, or open drivers. I'm just riffing, but it seems to me a reoccurring theme, and one fresh in my mind as I try to migrate from Windows to Ubuntu Budgie, but their lock down of Office and Windows means I must run an unwieldy full VM.

mugivarra69 3y ago

alex deutcher. google it.

itsTyrion 3y ago

why though