AMD Teases Upcoming Radeon "Fiji" GPU Launch

[dungeon]

OK, so two desktop cards, two laptop cards, and some low-power APUs. Still not very impressive, to be honest.

Makes me glad that I won't be upgrading anything myself at the moment after all.

If you want finished driver, stable and with all features, it is currently much less impressive than you might think... well if you want to think that way that can be true . Because driver is really new one, not relased yet in any stable kernel (will need 3 more months) and even then likely not will be so stable as radeon and it still have some key performance features missing, either in kernel or in userspace... well even Carrizo and Fiji hardware are not in the market yet...

If someone buy Carrizo or Fiji to use on Linux, fglrx will be there for sure... or people might try new opensource driver.

[GreatEmerald]

Well then the # of cards that can do that is zero, with or without the new kernel driver.

It will make doing that easier in the future but right now it's not possible, and it would take something like NVidia's new OpenGL ABI proposal to even make it an option.

Obviously. Upgrades are an investment to the future.

So just to be totally clear, easy switching between open and closed source userspace is *not* the reason we are doing this. The idea is to make better open source drivers (by having more developers work on getting the HW kernel code working properly) and better closed(-ish) drivers.

Obviously. But the other is a nice side-effect. And fglrx not being so hilariously hard to work with due to kernel issues is another reason. Of course, I'd rather use radeon for everything, but there might just be one or two games that require high OpenGL versions...

[smitty3268]

Obviously. But the other is a nice side-effect. And fglrx not being so hilariously hard to work with due to kernel issues is another reason. Of course, I'd rather use radeon for everything, but there might just be one or two games that require high OpenGL versions...

It's not a nice side-effect, because it doesn't exist. You're trying to assume something will happen in the future that nobody has ever said will happen. That's a recipe for disappointment.

Treat this as exactly what it is - open source kernel support for new hardware. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not disappointing, or impressive. It's simply new hardware support, which is exactly what we should be expecting. The disappointing part is that it took so long to come out after the 285 cards were released.