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Zhiye Liu News Editor, RAM Reviewer & SSD Technician Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
CelicaGT Interesting. I have a Dell AIO with an HD 7K GPU in in that was recently sunsetted by the Win10 EoL. I've been meaning to throw Ubuntu at it as it ran fine in a live environment from USB. Ironically the GPU never ran under 10…I had to disable it and use the integrated Intel lump. Reply
mitch074 The performance improvements were available before, but now they are by default as you now get audio over HDMI and hardware video compression/décompression. More interesting is that AMDGPU enables Vulkan support – including RT emulation on shaders. Think about it : a 13 years old RadeonHD 7950 running Indiana Jones… Reply
bit_user The article said: Linux has long been a haven for aging hardware — especially AMD graphics cards. While some improvements may take years to arrive, the open-source community remains dedicated to breathing new life into even the oldest hardware. As far as I understand, this was mainly about deprecating the legacy driver they had been using. That's why they wanted to transition them onto the newer one. mitch074 said: The performance improvements were available before, but now they are by default as you now get audio over HDMI and hardware video compression/décompression. These were the reasons why they didn't previously default to the new driver. mitch074 said: More interesting is that AMDGPU enables Vulkan support – including RT emulation on shaders. That is pretty neat! Almost makes me feel like a tool for buying a card with hardware RT support. Almost. Reply
Shiznizzle I wonder if its worth digging out the 6850? Geez i dont even have a mobo for that and would need to get a used one. Reply
bit_user Shiznizzle said: I wonder if its worth digging out the 6850? Heh, I have a HD 6850. I bought it based on price and reviews, but I think it's the last card I bought that featured a female character on the box art. It was a Sapphire brand, purchased in 2012. https://www.newegg.com/sapphire-tech-100315l-radeon-hd-6850-1gb-graphics-card-with-fan/p/N82E16814102908 It was my first 1 TFLOPS+ card. I thought it was amusing and somewhat incongruous how such a high-performance computing device was marketed! It has actually held up better than my HD 7870, which was XFX brand and seemed to have imbalanced fans. That thing made noise like a law mower, when you ran stuff like Furmark on it. Shiznizzle said: Geez i dont even have a mobo for that and would need to get a used one. It's just a PCIe 2.0 card. Should work in any board with a x16 slot, I think? They never made an AGP version of the HD 6850, AFAIK. Note that its outputs all seem limited to roughly 1440p. Reply
mitch074 The Radeon driver isn't deprecated – it's still the only driver available for Terascale and older GPUs. AMDGPU allows for features that are not supported at all on those older cards, but are on GCN. Your HD6xxx card can't make use of AMDGPU : it's Terascale3 based. While there is investigations about porting it to AMDGPU, it is a considerable amount of work because the features required to efficiently make use of the driver's structure are either broken (requiring workarounds) or missing (requiring emulation). RT on GCN1 cards : I actually managed to run the Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (in potato mode) on a RadeonHD 7770 1 Gb. With RT enabled. It was a pixel soup (internal resolution was 320×180) and a slideshow, but it actually rendered. On a top range GCN1 card with 3 or 4 Gb of VRAM, it might have been somewhat playable in 400×300… Reply
bit_user mitch074 said: The Radeon driver isn't deprecated – it's still the only driver available for Terascale and older GPUs. AMDGPU allows for features that are not supported at all on those older cards, but are on GCN. Okay, perhaps I was off by one driver. I think it was a previous patch that enabled VGA out on some even older card that was done so they could advance it to a newer driver and deprecate the one it had been using. mitch074 said: Your HD6xxx card can't make use of AMDGPU : it's Terascale3 based. It's VLIW5. I'm not sure which Terrascale that makes it, but the HD 69xx cards were VLIW4 and the last actual pre-GCN generation. mitch074 said: RT on GCN1 cards : I actually managed to run the Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool (in potato mode) on a RadeonHD 7770 1 Gb. With RT enabled. It was a pixel soup (internal resolution was 320×180) and a slideshow, but it actually rendered. On a top range GCN1 card with 3 or 4 Gb of VRAM, it might have been somewhat playable in 400×300… Again, cool that you could at least do it. It's enough for someone who just wants to kick the tires of the API, at least. Since I didn't need a RT card any sooner, I waited until AMD had a few generations of RT-enabled hardware under their belt, before I pulled the trigger on one. Got a RX 9070. Still haven't built the system that will use it, but sometime early next year (I do have all the components, thankfully). Reply
mitch074 bit_user said: Okay, perhaps I was off by one driver. I think it was a previous patch that enabled VGA out on some even older card that was done so they could advance it to a newer driver and deprecate the one it had been using. It's VLIW5. I'm not sure which Terrascale that makes it, but the HD 69xx cards were VLIW4 and the last actual pre-GCN generation. Again, cool that you could at least do it. It's enough for someone who just wants to kick the tires of the API, at least. Since I didn't need a RT card any sooner, I waited until AMD had a few generations of RT-enabled hardware under their belt, before I pulled the trigger on one. Got a RX 9070. Still haven't built the system that will use it, but sometime early next year (I do have all the components, thankfully). VGA out was a previous patch for GCN 1.1, and it was thus proposed for AMDGPU to be default for those. Before this was accepted, support for GCN 1.0 was completed too – so, both got it at the same time. Top range HD6xxx were Terascale3 using VLIW4. Previous Terascale versions used VLIW5. I had a RX6600XT. I could run RT either natively, or use emulation. Performance difference was around 40% lower in early AMDGPU emulation mode – that's consistent with AMD running RT on shaders units through the firmware on RDNA2. RDNA4 does catch up by quite a lot – I have a RX9060XT 16 Gb, most older RT games run very smoothly. RT emulation starts being quite useful with Vega, but even Polaris could do stuff with it – my RX480 8 Gb can do minimal RT thanks to that, it's actually enabled by default for Indiana Jones and it's playable. Reply
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/legacy-amd-gpus-receive-30-percent-performance-boost-thanks-to-latest-linux-kernel-update-finally-drops-obsolete-radeon-graphics-driver-for-gcn-1-0-and-gcn-1-1-cards-after-more-than-two-decades#main
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