Despite celebrating its 24th anniversary this year, the legacy Radeon R300 video card series continues to receive updates thanks to ongoing open-source driver development. The ATI R300 Gallium3D project, originally reverse-engineered, continues to receive intermittent but significant contributions from the community. Recently, developer Pavel Ondračka resolved an issue adding support for occlusion queries, a feature that will benefit existing accelerators.
His pull request, included in recent nightly builds of Mesa 26.1-devel, details his approach. Previous attempts to fix this functionality were made as far back as 2012, but were reverted due to technical issues. The new approach avoids those problems by only utilizing a dummy z-buffer when the requests are active, proving to be a less intrusive solution.
The developer has already tested the fix with popular benchmarks like Lightsmark and Unigine, confirming stable operation. The upcoming release promises full support for OpenGL occlusion queries, a welcome development for users of older graphics hardware. Further refinements for large surfaces are as well in progress and currently awaiting approval. This continued support for older hardware demonstrates the power of open-source development in extending the lifespan of technology.
