By iwano@_84Posted on December 13, 2021 Back in 2002, if you were a hip Personal computer gamer you had been most likely enjoying Grand Theft Car Vice City on your model new ATI Radeon R300 graphics card and listening to Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi.” Now that sk8r boi is possibly a sk8r grandpa, the R300 is having a new driver with a extensive-awaited bug resolve. In accordance to Phoronix, the ATI Radeon R300, R400, and R500 graphics playing cards are getting a new open-supply graphics driver less than Linux that will breathe added lifestyle into these around 20-yr-previous GPUs. The new open up-resource driver is made by developer Emma Anholt, and is made to give these GPUs the means to ask for NIR shaders from the Mesa 3D graphics library’s state tracker and use the NIR to TGSI path. NIR is an optimizing compiler stack that sits at the main of driver shader compilers from Mesa. Generally, it really is an optimization layer that tries to cut down the amount of get the job done a GPU has to do when operating 3D purposes. This suggests these outdated graphics playing cards will get a improve to gaming efficiency, and more rapidly loading occasions of games. But, with how outdated these cards are, never assume them to operate today’s most recent titles at any playable body premiums due to the components restrictions of these around 20-12 months-old playing cards. But for folks that run more mature video games, this new driver should really deliver a awesome boost to GPU effectiveness over-all. To demonstrate just how outdated these GPUs are, the R500 graphics playing cards, also named the X1000 series were launched in 2007 and have been crafted on a massive 90nm system. The flagship card at the time, the ATI Radeon X1800 XT could only reach 83 Gflops of overall performance (with a G). It truly is a much cry from today where by the best graphics playing cards, like the RTX 3090, can reach more than 35 TFlops. Phoronix also notes that there is the probability of restricting NIR to just the R500 collection of ATI graphics cards given that the R300 and R400 cards are much more hardware constrained. However this is not verified and is just an thought currently being reviewed for now. Anholt is hoping to get this driver released by the time Mesa 22. will come out, but additional local community tests is wished-for to guarantee the driver is stable. HARDWARE Tags: AMDDriverGPULinuxmonthsneighborhoodoutdatedUpdates