AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[karthikrg]

I think withdrawing support for R500 series cards is bad.. they are jus abt 2-3 years old now.. and i'm sure AMD's gr8 catalyst team is gonna continue 2 goof up wonderfully as they have been doing all along even after removing this support and "shrinking the codebase".. thank god i switched to a laptop with Nvidia 9600M graphics.. the prop. driver runs wonderfully without any hitches for me

[yoshi314]

In all fairness to AMD, it was a Novell developer that was laid off. That's hardly something you can blame AMD for.

that makes you wonder whether fglrx team also got reduced, doesn't it?

[Jon4u!SvenJonsson]

As an owner of two r400 based cards (an x800gto agp and an x700 mobility in my laptop) i am not happy with amd's decision.

The current opensource driver (xf-86-video-ati and the mesa stack) is nowhere near fglrx in terms of stability and features (at least for me).
3D using the opensource drivers (eg for playing older games like doom3 or nwn) results in lockups or graphical corruption. Features like powerplay are not supported. Using the opensource-driver on my x700 results in white-screen on modeswitch / vt-switch. Using the opensource-driver on my x700 and my x800 with kde-4.2 results in lockups when desktop-effects are enabled.

I know that this is not amd's fault, and i also know that the opensource-developers work hard to improve the situation, but current situation is not good for owners of r400 based cards. There are too few opensource-developers working on the drivers, and the current focus seems to be more on bringing new features to the driver, then fixing bugs, resulting in an total loss of stability. The modeswitch for example worked great around xf-video-ati-6.8.0, but now with everyone switching to kms i frequently get a white-screen on my laptop. 3D worked somewhat (at least i could play nwn) until mesa-7.0, but now even starting glxgears results in an hardlock on my x800.

Bad times for ati-users i think.

A disappointed user.

cheers Jon

[karthikrg]

What is so stable about fglrx.. tearing videos with compiz&Xv + slow 2D (no render acceleration) + Heavy problems with wine.. are just some of the problems.. not to mention that for about 10 releases of fglrx from oct 2006 to aug 2007.. my x1800 never worked.. it just used to blackout when X used to start.. this is fglrx for u.. i have never had problems with xf86-video-radeon on KDE 4.2 personally.. infact it has been a smooth experience with compositing enabled also

[aradaj]

This news just sent shivers down my spine and I immediately remembered this little rant about Vista and it's adverse affects on linux in general.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

specifically the section about "Denial-of-Service via Driver/Device Revocation"

As I understand it, companies such as nvidia and ati are in effect forced to abandon UDA as decribed by the atricle linked above. And I believe that also has an adverse affect on linux because we are such a small market segment. I know that it also takes alot of time and resources to support legacy hardware, and with limited resources it doesn't make financial sense for ATI/AMD to keep supporting it.

I am a happy owner of a AIW-9800Pro, and recently an XFX HD4350 (to support open source development), and if ATI would have come out with the HD4850 6 Months earlier than when i bought my 8800gt, i would have been a happy owner of a hd4850 instead.

[Jon4u!SvenJonsson]

What is so stable about fglrx.. tearing videos with compiz&Xv + slow 2D (no render acceleration) + Heavy problems with wine.. are just some of the problems.. not to mention that for about 10 releases of fglrx from oct 2006 to aug 2007.. my x1800 never worked.. it just used to blackout when X used to start.. this is fglrx for u.. i have never had problems with xf86-video-radeon on KDE 4.2 personally.. infact it has been a smooth experience with compositing enabled also

Personal experience varies .

For me fglrx worked well since around 2006 (and i used it since release 3.14, golden times back then ). I dont say that the opensource-drivers are bad per se, but for my situation they are unuseable. Currently the opensource-developers are focused on 1) supporting new cards and 2) supporting new features, both good things, but stability for older cards really sucks. Too few developers i think.

cheers Jon

[chrisr]

Angry laptop owner...!

I bought my laptop in July 2007, and it was a "latest model" Lenovo T60p with a FireGL V5250. This chip is apparently akin to a R535, and it plays World of Warcraft acceptably under Fedora 10 at 1680x1050 resolution. At least, it does now. For many months after I first bought my laptop, the fglrx driver used to lock up when playing WoW. For months after that, it needed to pretend to have a X1700 chip instead. And now I learn that the Catalyst 9.3 release will be the last release for my laptop at all.

Gee, thanks.

Does Catalyst 9.2 support the Linux 2.6.28 kernel? Will Catalyst 9.3 at least support the 2.6.29 kernel? (I'm still using the 2.6.27.x series.) I bought this laptop specifically to be a portable "World of Warcraft machine" and the Mesa 3D support simply isn't ready to replace fglrx yet. (And that includes R300 chips too!)

[susikala]

Good move by AMD, kudos, there's little need for functionality duplication. Though I would completely stop developing Catalyst for Linux and concentrate the efforts purely on the FOSS drivers.

[[Knuckles]]

Well there goes support for both ATI cards I use... I think R500 is too soon, my local store still sells R500 cards!

I hope those drivers get pretty darn good.

[marcobrancalion]

AMD people want to force us to buy newer video cards, eh?.....
I got the message very clearly. A new nvidia card will be here soon .....