According to Phoronix two new OpenGL extensions have just been wired into the R300 Gallium3D driver in Mesa 25.3-devel, offering better memory insight for graphics cards released when flip phones were still cutting edge. The R300 driver doesn’t just cover the Radeon 9000 series either, but also supports the X300, X600, X700, X800, and the X1000-series R500 cards.

That’s right, if you’ve got a dusty old Radeon X850 XT Platinum wedged in a box somewhere, it now supports GL_ATI_meminfo and GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info, which were added by open-source dev Brais Solla and merged into Mesa this week.

GL_ATI_meminfo originally tipped up in 2009 and GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info came later, both giving apps more visibility into GPU memory use. While they won’t turbocharge ancient silicon, they do give a bit more control and insight for games and applications still stubbornly clinging to life on that hardware.

This is yet another example of the open-source community doing what big vendors won’t: keeping old hardware functional long after corporate drivers have been sent to the glue factory. Mesa’s support will ship in version 25.3 later this year, and over in kernel land, the Radeon DRM driver is still humming along for these fossilised chips.

It’s 2025, and somehow, a graphics card released during the Iraq War still gets driver updates. The Linux community refuses to let silicon die quietly.