I have an old unused i5 machine currently with no GPU (well it has an Intel HD4000 on board) and I was thinking of repurposing it as a bare metal Haiku box. And after reading and searching on this topic I can’t figure out if there is working 2d hardware acceleration or not? Like there is the RadeonGfx thing, but what cards does that support? Is it production ready, alpha or beta? What’s it’s status? @X512
Otherwise what sort of cheapish GPU would work well and maybe have a path forward to good performance? Maybe I could play around with some driver code and…?
2D hardware acceleration is an obsolete concept and it is not implemented in modern hardware (2005+ year). Hardware-accelerated 2D rendering libraries such as Skia use OpenGL/Vulkan 3D acceleration APIs.
RadeonGfx is currently experimental and not ready for common use.
What’s wrong with the onboard chipset? If it works, just use that. You will save on power consumption and it is enough to run Haiku in its current state. You can always install a GPU in a few years when a driver becomes available for one?
Nothing really. I did get it up and running for half an hour and wasn’t depressed by the performance, it was much better than the vmware image I was running previously. Then the PSU started making ticking noises. Then I bought a new PSU. Then that was DOA. It’s been a whole day alright.
Ok so I’ve found out what “wrong” with the onboard chipset. It’s limited to 1920x1080 over HDMI when my screen is 1440p. So yeah… there’s that. The DVI port may be better? But most likely I’d have to buy a cable specifically for that.
I did buy a cheap (A$30) PSU on facebook market place, just to get the boxen booting. And it does now boot and I’m typing this from that machine right now. The new DOA PSU is going back under warrenty.