Open-Source Driver For ATI R300 Era GPUs Seeing Improved Power Mac Support In 2026
For those that happen to still be running a 22+ year old Apple Power Mac such as those from 2004 with an IBM PowerPC processor and ATI Radeon 9600 XT or 9800 XT graphics, there are open-source driver improvements for Linux still happening in 2026 to benefit this vintage hardware.
Open-source developer Pavel Ondračka remains one of the few contributors left to the Radeon R300 Gallium3D open-source driver within the Mesa codebase for providing OpenGL support on ATI R300 / R400 / R500 series graphics processors. The newest hardware supported by the R300 Gallium3D driver is the Radeon X1000 series that itself launched 21 years ago.
The latest work by Pavel Ondračka on the R300 Gallium3D driver is landing a number of fixes around the CPU big endian "BE" support. In particular, he's been testing R300 driver fixes on an Apple Power Mac G5 and debugging a number of different issues that don't appear with little endian processors.
In testing on the Power Mac G5 with old Radeon 9000 series graphics, he was able to fix indexed draws, various format fixes, some fixes for constant color blending, an occlusion query fix, and other fixes.
This merge is now part of Mesa 26.2-devel for improving the big endian support with this old Radeon OpenGL driver. Mesa 26.2 stable is due out in August while it's also possible these R300 BE fixes will be back-ported soon to the current Mesa 26.1 series.
Open-source developer Pavel Ondračka remains one of the few contributors left to the Radeon R300 Gallium3D open-source driver within the Mesa codebase for providing OpenGL support on ATI R300 / R400 / R500 series graphics processors. The newest hardware supported by the R300 Gallium3D driver is the Radeon X1000 series that itself launched 21 years ago.
The latest work by Pavel Ondračka on the R300 Gallium3D driver is landing a number of fixes around the CPU big endian "BE" support. In particular, he's been testing R300 driver fixes on an Apple Power Mac G5 and debugging a number of different issues that don't appear with little endian processors.
In testing on the Power Mac G5 with old Radeon 9000 series graphics, he was able to fix indexed draws, various format fixes, some fixes for constant color blending, an occlusion query fix, and other fixes.
This merge is now part of Mesa 26.2-devel for improving the big endian support with this old Radeon OpenGL driver. Mesa 26.2 stable is due out in August while it's also possible these R300 BE fixes will be back-ported soon to the current Mesa 26.1 series.