Open-Source R300 Driver Adds New OpenGL Extensions For Two Decade Old Radeon GPUs
While the ATI Radeon 9000 / X300 / X500 / X600 series "R300" GPU support has long been unmaintained on the Microsoft Windows driver side, thanks to the open-source community the Linux driver support keeps going for the old ATI R300 GPUs with that driver also supporting the X700 / X800 "R400" and X1000 "R500" series graphics cards too. Two more OpenGL extensions are now wired up for the old R300 Gallium3D driver within Mesa.
As of today within Mesa 25.3-devel, the OpenGL GL_ATI_meminfo and GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info extensions are wired up for the R300 Gallium3D driver. These aging extensions provide more details around the graphics card's memory. GL_ATI_meminfo is from 2009 albeit newer than the R300 series itself and for providing more insight around vRAM memory consumption. GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info similarly provides visibility into GPU hardware memory utilization for more effective game/application management.
It's taken until 2025 but as a sign of the R300 driver still seeing some new open-source activity, R300 now supports both the GL_ATI_meminfo and GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info extensions. Independent open-source developer Brais Solla worked on these extensions for R300 and were mainlined this morning to Mesa Git.
This merge landed the support and is confirmed to be working on ATI R300 through R500 (X1000 series) graphics cards. This support will be part of next quarter's Mesa 25.3 release while over in kernel space the Radeon DRM driver continues working with these two decade old graphics cards.
As of today within Mesa 25.3-devel, the OpenGL GL_ATI_meminfo and GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info extensions are wired up for the R300 Gallium3D driver. These aging extensions provide more details around the graphics card's memory. GL_ATI_meminfo is from 2009 albeit newer than the R300 series itself and for providing more insight around vRAM memory consumption. GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info similarly provides visibility into GPU hardware memory utilization for more effective game/application management.
It's taken until 2025 but as a sign of the R300 driver still seeing some new open-source activity, R300 now supports both the GL_ATI_meminfo and GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info extensions. Independent open-source developer Brais Solla worked on these extensions for R300 and were mainlined this morning to Mesa Git.
This merge landed the support and is confirmed to be working on ATI R300 through R500 (X1000 series) graphics cards. This support will be part of next quarter's Mesa 25.3 release while over in kernel space the Radeon DRM driver continues working with these two decade old graphics cards.