20-year-old ATI Radeon GPUs are still getting driver updates and extensions — old ATI Radeon R300 GPUs receive Linux updates from the community

ATI R300 GPU on a Medion Radeon 9600TX card

(Image credit: ATI R300 GPU.jpg: Gona.eu derivative work dated 7 April 2024: Pittigrilli, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons. Added background to fit 16-9 ratio)

Providing another fine example of the depth of support for older hardware on Linux, driver extensions have just been released to deliver functional improvements for owners of old ATI Radeon R300 GPUs. Linux-centric site Phoronix notes that the new OpenGL Extensions from the open-source community will also deliver benefits to X700 / X800, R400, and X1000 R500 series graphics cards.

Let’s talk about the depth of support on offer here. Old ATI X300 series GPUs first walked the Earth in 2002 AD. They were the backbone of the Radeon 9000 series graphics cards, starting with the game-changing Radeon 9700 PRO, which spearheaded the latest DirectX 9 and AGP 8X performance technologies on the desktop. For a major episode of nostalgia, flick through our 29-page review of this Red Team challenger that “proved to be superior in all possible categories.”

ATI R300 GPU still getting support — (Image credit: Future)

It’s pretty heartwarming that these veteran slivers of silicon are still carefully tended for by the Linux community. According to our searches, mainline Windows support for R300 GPUs ended with the Catalyst 9.3 unified driver in March 2009. When AMD released Catalyst 9.4 the following month, nothing older than the Radeon HD 2000 series (R600 GPU family), which debuted in mid-2007, was supported.

So, what’s new with the Linux driver? As part of the upcoming release of Mesa 25.3, the R300 Gallium3D driver will now support two memory-related OpenGL extensions that weren’t implemented prior to this week.

Specifically, independent open-source developer, Brais Solla, has worked to mainline the OpenGL GL_ATI_meminfo and GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info extensions into the Mesa Git. In the words of the developer, this merge request is for an extension which “allows OpenGL programs like glxinfo to query how much VRAM is available to use on both the GPU memory and GTT, as well as the total amount of memory.” Remember, keeping track of VRAM is all the more important on ancient GPUs with access to as little as 64MB of the precious stuff.

Expect this driver extension to be part of the Mesa 25.3 release in the coming quarter.

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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

7 Comments Comment from the forums

ezst036

Planned obsolescence is a choice. Its not inevitable.

The future of computing looks absolutely wonderful.
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King_V

Ha! I've still got one of these, admittedly a lowly Radeon 9250 9550 (edit: thanks @BFG-9000 for catching my mistake), still working in a Pentium 3-based system I've got sitting somewhere with a Windows 98Lite (Win 98 core, Win 95 GUI) installation. Running a whopping 416MB of RAM. The configuration in 3 RAM slots is:
256 MB
128 MB
32 MBIf I recall correctly, those sticks happened to have the same timings. But, uh, it's been quite a while since I was tracking that hardware :sweatsmile:
Reply
Obummer

If only they showed the some love for my 4650.
Reply
BFG-9000

King_V said:
Ha! I've still got one of these, admittedly a lowly Radeon 9250, still working in a Pentium 3-based system
I hate to break this to you, but that's from the previous gen DX8.1 R200 series like the Radeon 8500, not the very DX9 R300 mentioned here which gets a new driver in Mesa 25.3. R200 is so unloved that Kernel support for it was dropped back in the Mesa 22 driver.
What this means is distros based on Debian 12 (such as AntiX 23 or MX-Linux 23) that comes with Mesa 22 do not support your GPU out of the box, and while old drivers were spun off into Mesa-amber that appears difficult to compile and build due to coexistence problems with an also-installed Mesa 22.

You could use an older distro using the older Mesa 21 driver such as AntiX 22 which is technically supported until 2026, but it would be better to change GPUs to something like the R300 that is the topic of this thread because the performance and quality jump from R200 was huge and considered to be one of the largest in 3D history, on par with the introduction to Voodoo Graphics.

Technically, R9250 is a cut-down economy version of the R8500 with half the vertex and texture units as well as slower clocks and usually half the memory bus width. And with 4x antialiasing enabled in UT2003, R9700 Pro was 364% faster than R8500.
Reply
King_V

BFG-9000 said:
I hate to break this to you, but that's from the previous gen DX8.1 R200 series like the Radeon 8500, not the very DX9 R300 mentioned here which gets a new driver in Mesa 25.3. R200 is so unloved that Kernel support for it was dropped back in the Mesa 22 driver.
What this means is distros based on Debian 12 (such as AntiX 23 or MX-Linux 23) that comes with Mesa 22 do not support your GPU out of the box, and while old drivers were spun off into Mesa-amber that appears difficult to compile and build due to coexistence problems with an also-installed Mesa 22.

You could use an older distro using the older Mesa 21 driver such as AntiX 22 which is technically supported until 2026, but it would be better to change GPUs to something like the R300 that is the topic of this thread because the performance and quality jump from R200 was huge and considered to be one of the largest in 3D history, on par with the introduction to Voodoo Graphics.

Technically, R9250 is a cut-down economy version of the R8500 with half the vertex and texture units as well as slower clocks and usually half the memory bus width. And with 4x antialiasing enabled in UT2003, R9700 Pro was 364% faster than R8500.
Ugh, boy did I fumble finger! It actually is a 9550. I was also thinking about the 7250 I have in a Super 7 system with an AMD K6-2+ 400MHz (I think OC'd to 450). Probably when I was typing, my brain merged the two together.

This is the one, complete with the (at least I thought) kinda cool branding for the heatsink. Purchased February 2005.

The 7250 (SE?) on the other hand, I think I got used on Ebay. Not sure when.
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BFG-9000

Ah, I am not aware of any R7250 but there were various flavors of 7200 and 7500 which were all DX7 R100 series, support for which was also dropped in Mesa 22.

Not that it matters, when the latest 6.15 kernel just also officially dropped support for early i586 CPUs such as K6-2+
Reply
King_V

BFG-9000 said:
Ah, I am not aware of any R7250 but there were various flavors of 7200 and 7500 which were all DX7 R100 series, support for which was also dropped in Mesa 22.

Not that it matters, when the latest 6.15 kernel just also officially dropped support for early i586 CPUs such as K6-2+
Yeah, it's more just a "hey, I have one of those" thing that anything else.

The Radeon 7250 I believe was a cut down version of the 7200, though it's been a touch over 20 years since I got that card, and the cobwebs in my brain are piling up.

Not to be confused with the R7 250, which is a different (and more modern) creature entirely.
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