Aged 20-year-old ATI Radeon GPUs (specifically R300 models) continue to receive driver updates and extensions; community-led Linux updates support these older GPUs.

In a significant development for Linux users with old ATI Radeon graphics cards, independent open-source developer Brais Solla has merged two memory-related OpenGL extensions into the Mesa Git. These extensions, GL_ATI_meminfo and GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info, are expected to be part of the upcoming Mesa 25.3 release in the coming quarter.

These extensions, which keep track of VRAM, are particularly important for ancient GPUs with limited VRAM, such as the 64MB found in some R300 series GPUs. The merge request will allow OpenGL programs like glxinfo to query the amount of VRAM available to use on both GPU memory and GTT, as well as the total amount of memory.

The R300 Gallium3D driver, part of the Mesa 25.3 release, now supports these extensions that weren't implemented before this week. This is a significant step as mainline Windows support for R300 GPUs ended with the Catalyst 9.3 unified driver in March 2009, and AMD's Catalyst 9.4, released in April 2009, did not support anything older than the Radeon HD 2000 series.

The ATI X300 series GPUs, introduced in 2002, were the backbone of the Radeon 9000 series graphics cards. One of the significant parts of this series was the Radeon 9700 PRO, which introduced DirectX 9 and AGP 8X performance technologies on the desktop. These older graphics cards will now benefit from the new extensions, along with the X700 / X800, R400, and X1000 R500 series.

This development is a testament to the ongoing efforts of open-source developers to keep older hardware functional and relevant in today's technology landscape. Linux users with old ATI Radeon graphics cards can look forward to improved performance and functionality with the upcoming Mesa 25.3 release.

Aged 20-year-old ATI Radeon GPUs (specifically R300 models) continue to receive driver updates and extensions; community-led Linux updates support these older GPUs.