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.
    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.

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