AMD's 22-year-old GPUs are still getting driver updates — ATI's R300 - R500 from the early 2000s live on in Linux driver patches thanks to the open-source community

Tell us, grandpa, what was dial-up like?

Most of the updates are about long term support the performance gains are a side product.

This driver was one of the earliest open source drivers developed by AMD. The point of the driver is to convert OpenGL (instructions games give to draw 3D shapes) into the low level commands a graphics card uses.

A library (TMSC I think) was written to do this, however they found OpenGL commands often relied on the results of others and converting back to OpenGL was really CPU expensive.

So someone invented NIR, its an intermediate layer. You convert all OpenGL commands to NIR and it uses way less CPU to convert from NIR to GPU commands and back.

People in their spare time have been updating the old AMD drivers so they use the same libraries, interfaces, etc.. as the modern AMD drivers.

This update removes the last of the TMSC? usage so now the driver uses only NIR.

From a dev perspective everything now works the same way (less effort) from a user perspective those old cards get the performance bump NIR brought.

Yup, these updates help make sure your gpu still works with each os update, as well as maybe fixing a bit of uncaught issues/bugs

Other people have mentioned it a bit, but a huge thing in my opinion is just support for newer kernels. I held on to a GTX 570 for a looong time because it worked just fine for everything I wanted to play, but I was kind of upset because 1) it never got the Vulkan support Nvidia promised at one point, and 2) eventually the Nvidia binary blob driver stopped supporting it, and eventually the old binary blob no longer ran on newer kernels due to changing APIs. Open source drivers make it a lot easier for somebody to support the hardware if they care about it enough for a very long time. This is one of the main reasons why I kind of refuse to buy an Nvidia GPU now. I just wish GPGPU support was better on AMD platforms (though this seems to be improving?)