It’s remarkable that ATI’s R300 through R500 series Radeon GPUs, which debuted over a decade ago, are still being supported by the open-source community. This year, Linux will receive driver updates for these ancient graphics cards, ensuring they can still function on modern Linux operating systems.
Although these GPUs are outdated, the open-source drivers have kept them alive and enabled them to continue running on newer Linux distributions. The upcoming Linux driver update will focus on NIR lowering, which is related to the vertex shaders of the GPUs. The update is set to be available in the next quarter, specifically in Mesa 24.0, giving users of the R300-R500 series Radeon GPUs access to the update by the end of the year.
The ATI R300 was first introduced in 2002 with the release of the ATI Radeon 9700 PRO. This GPU featured an AGP interface and a 150nm process. It had 110 million transistors, a core clock speed of 325MHz, 256MB of memory, and 19.8GB/s of memory bandwidth. At the time of its launch, the Radeon 9700 PRO was the fastest GPU, surpassing Nvidia’s GeForce 4 Ti 4600 in almost every workload. It was also the first GPU to fully support DirectX 9.
Following the success of the R300, ATI released the R400 and R500 series GPUs, which made further improvements to the architecture of the R300. These newer GPUs featured more pixel pipelines, vertex shader engines, and faster memory configurations.
While these old GPUs may not be able to handle demanding tasks on modern operating systems, the fact that they can still run a contemporary Linux OS is impressive. Although their capabilities may be limited to displaying windows and text, the continued support from the open-source community ensures that these GPUs can still provide some functionality to their users.
The source of the article is from the blog combopop.com.br