Thread

The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux

472 points · 97 comments · speckx

wewewedxfgdf · 1791070970 · focus · HN ↗
If only AMD did this.
1. Waterluvian · 1791071118 · focus · HN ↗
  Is there financial incentive for them to bother?
  1. wewewedxfgdf · 1791071305 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps not but one of the great things about Nvidia is their latest drivers often support very old cards.
    Waterluvian · 1791071740 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe there’s a prestige angle to somewhat shame them into keeping up with nvidia. Though my sense is that they’re barely peers anymore in this space. :(
    benoau · 1791076580 · focus · HN ↗
    They're in the process of ending support for everything below the RTX 2000 series -
    <a href="https://windowsforum.com/news/nvidia-ends-feature-support-for-maxwell-pascal-and-volta-gpus-with-590-driver.395102/" rel="nofollow">https://windowsforum.com/news/nvidia-ends-feature-support-fo...
    kingstnap · 1791125435 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean the GTX 1080 is over a decade old.
    Compare it to some other products from that time:
    - AMD FX Piledriver CPUs
    - Skylake i7-6700K
    - iPhone 6s
    - Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
    - Oculus Rift CV1
    - Android 6 Marshmallow
    ahartmetz · 1791139937 · focus · HN ↗
    The GTX 1080 (Ti) still works for the vast majority of games in 1080p. The only thing that would really make it obsolete is driver issues.
    jasomill · 1791163014 · focus · HN ↗
    As does Skylake.
    Also, compared to replacing a CPU, which likely entails replacing motherboard and RAM, upgrading to something like a used or NOS 3070 is easy and inexpensive.
    Telaneo · 1791153878 · focus · HN ↗
    I wish we did better when it came to software support. Hardware can last a long time if some effort is made on the software side. The 6700k isn't supported by Windows 11, but not for any good reasons. It's still got the performance to do quite a lot.
    Bulldozer (and thus Piledriver) was stillborn unless you were a diehard AMD fan or an overclocker, so I don't think it's helpful to lump in here.
    I'd still use an iPhone SE (released the same year as the 6s) if the battery could be easily replaced and iOS still supported it. I don't do anything on my phone that needs significant performance anyway.
    I still keep my 2012 Macbook Pro around as a backup machine if something happens to my main machines, and every time I drag it out to check up on it, it still works great. It stopped getting any significant MacOS updates in 2022, but Linux still gets updates.
    returnorthrow · 1791079462 · focus · HN ↗
    Perhaps René, the maintainer of T/2 Linux, will end up vibe coding an NVIDIA driver one of these days. He’s been reverse engineering and vibe coding a bunch of drivers for old graphics lately and live streaming everything.
    jeroenhd · 1791098968 · focus · HN ↗
    I've been having issues with kernel updates because Nvidia dropped support for my GPUs. Apparently 9 years was the threshold for their "very old card" support because Pascal is now over.
    The community can't fix it because their drivers are proprietary blobs. Open source drivers are essentially useless. I'll have to stick to something like Ubuntu to keep the hardware working without fighting DKMS every update.
    This is the reason my next GPU will be either AMD or Intel.
    theandrewbailey · 1791114395 · focus · HN ↗
    Nvidia's latest drivers don't support GTX 1000 and older GPUs. They are barely 10 years old and are still plenty fast for a lot of software.
  2. emilsedgh · 1791079979 · focus · HN ↗
    One thing they should've learned from Nvidia is that it's really worth it for them to invest making their devices function as broadly as possible. Crypto and AI waves both benefited Nvidia much more than AMD partly due to their devices being more universally usable.
    That "partly" was worth hundreds of billions of dollars but AMD were cheap/shortsighted enough to hire a few dedicated engineers.
    jiggawatts · 1791089707 · focus · HN ↗
    Trillions.
    jeroenhd · 1791098596 · focus · HN ↗
    AMD put a lot of effort into supporting common features every GPU should support, like OpenCL/OpenGL/Vulkan. Nvidia put a lot of effort in proprietary crap that only worked on their cards.
    For various reasons, people flocked to CUDA and other proprietary crap. Then, when that proprietary crap became a money maker, people blamed AMD for not supporting their favourite proprietary crap.
    AMD did the right thing and was punished for it. They're still doing the right thing and people still complain that their free full re-implementation of Nvidia's runtime, designed for completely different hardware, isn't good enough.
    AMD is not a saint of a company but it's consistently better than Nvidia, every time. Doing the right thing just isn't rewarded and it shows.
    Pannoniae · 1791174256 · focus · HN ↗
    on older (read: older than RDNA) AMD GPUs the OpenGL drivers are so poor that half the games just either crash outright or have colourswap bugs (RGBA -> BGRA i.e. your game turns blue and orange)
    On Linux at least you can use Mesa to fix it up. On Windows you're.... out of luck I guess unless someone writes a binarypatch or something?
    I wouldn't call it great support, NV "just works"
    throwaway27448 · 1791138954 · focus · HN ↗
    Surely this should be the opposite direction, no? Nvidia drivers on linux have always been trash. If anything, I would much prefer nvidia learn from amd.
2. bigyabai · 1791076865 · focus · HN ↗
  AMD supports Mesa precisely so that enthusiasts can do this.
  Nvidia doesn't, and their Vulkan stack underperforms on Linux quite significantly.
  1. pjmlp · 1791093999 · focus · HN ↗
    Except VFX and Hollywood have no qualms using proprietary drivers.
    simoncion · 1791096623 · focus · HN ↗
    Even proprietary drivers can use Mesa. Most of Mesa is MIT-licensed.
    It's just that Nvidia doesn't care much about Linux, and -as always- Nvidia ignores what everyone else is doing and does their own thing. Sometimes doing their own thing works out really well in the short run, but -long term- they always fall behind.
    AceJohnny2 · 1791097873 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's just that Nvidia doesn't care much about Linux
    Nvidia cares a lot about Linux. Just... on their terms.
    braiamp · 1791107399 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, Nvidia cares a lot if you are using compute (aka CUDA). If you are using their pure compute offerings, they are really top of the line on performance and tooling.
    okanat · 1791141114 · focus · HN ↗
    Though only with commercial distros. If you're using a fixed version of RedHat, SUSE or Ubuntu (which Canonical offers a commercial version), you're fine. Just hope that their support is long enough and NEVER EVER change kernel versions except patches!
    If your GPU is older than 5 years, then you're in danger zone and you should have completely replaced your hardware 3 years ago and bought new Nvidia equipment now 10x more expensive!
    hobo123 · 1791128105 · focus · HN ↗
    Terms which famously caused Linus Torvalds to tell them to FU.
    bigyabai · 1791137315 · focus · HN ↗
    With fairness; some things have changed.
    The biggest issue was Nvidia's insistence on buffer management with EGLStreams instead of GBM, which broke a lot of desktops. But they forfeit that fight ~4 years ago.
    torginus · 1791148688 · focus · HN ↗
    EGLStreams actually was(is) a pretty good API, and I think most compositors would've had a much better time if they decided to implement that on top of GBM.
    To summarize the difference between the two, with EGLStreams, you just request a buffer to draw into from a pool, then once you're done, you just submit it, thereby relinquishing control of it.
    With GBM, you explicitly need to manage the lifetime and access of your buffers, making sure you don't leak or accidentally write it when the GPU/driver tries to, there's no clear ownership, and you have to handle surfaces for double/triple buffering.
    It's a much lower level API, and much harder for drivers and app developers to get right, which was no doubt responsible for many years of buggy Wayland compositors - in fact, basically there wasn't a single correct implementation until Valve built Gamescope/their wlroots-based KWin fork and did a bunch of driver work.
    pjmlp · 1791099368 · focus · HN ↗
    They care about Linux, on their own distribution and licensing terms, NVidia even has their own distro.
    Like most FOSS done by companies, what they don't care is GPL, which sadly will eventually be meaningless after boomer and Gen X devs that created the GNU movement no longer walk this plane.
    There isn't a single embedded OS FOSS alternative to GNU/Linux that uses GPL, including Linux Foundation's own Zephyr.
    okanat · 1791141837 · focus · HN ↗
    Having two Mesa installations at once is how you summon dragons to fight. The FOSS Linux ecosystem doesn't really play well with multiple versions of libraries.
3. Arech · 1791102547 · focus · HN ↗
  Well, AMD open sources all its stack, making this possible.

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