AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[monraaf]

We're trying to get 6xx/7xx EXA and Xv acceleration into the open source drivers that ship with 9.04. So far so good...

Sounds good!

[primefalcon]

So we'll have 3d acceleration on the Open Source drivers?!?

[bridgman]

Yes, but I don't think we'll have 3D ready in time to be included in 9.04 -- it'll have to be added separately by updating drivers after 9.04 is released.

I am hoping we can get EXA (2D) and Xv (video) acceleration in though...

[TheK]

Yes, but I don't think we'll have 3D ready in time to be included in 9.04 -- it'll have to be added separately by updating drivers after 9.04 is released.

I am hoping we can get EXA (2D) and Xv (video) acceleration in though...

Uhm, you know, that the beta freeze is in 1 week? I wonder, how you are so sure, that you can get *any* new update in...

[rbmorse]

Call it a bug fix?

[BlackStar]

Uhm, you know, that the beta freeze is in 1 week? I wonder, how you are so sure, that you can get *any* new update in...

Ubuntu has been known to thaw the freeze for important updates. They did that with Firefox 3 on 8.04. They also did that with Catalyst 8.10 on (who'd guess!) 8.10.

There's a good chance this will happen here, too.

[primefalcon]

We can hope it'd be horrible to wave to wait for the Koala

[pawstar]

The 5xx generation of GPUs don't have the kind of video overlay you remember from earlier hardware. It's not a question of driver support.

Alright ... still, I expected better accelerated video support through whatever means possible with the video card, especially when it works all nice and dandy with high def video under winblows, but under linux it chokes on standard def video (though I will admit it got a bit better with the last few fglrx revisions).

Rotation and multi-monitor should both be supported in the open drivers today.

Nope, never got it to work properly. I managed to enable it for two monitors - though NOT in a usable state and never with three.

My impression was that stability with the open drivers was very good today; have you tried them recently ?

Last time was in January, and tried them again now - still the same as before.

Right now I am staring on my desktop computer screens looking at garbled output from the ati driver. Whole bunch of white lines. I move a window, it doesn't even redraw itself. This is with the ati driver. At least the resolution & rotation is correct.

RadeonHD v1.2.4 ain't any better. Sure, it works more or less with the single center monitor but the moment I enable a second monitor, things just stop working properly. The main resolution is bumped down from 2560x1600 to 1920x1200 with no way to get it back up, the second monitor has constant flickering lines and keeps blanking out every few seconds and takes forever to redraw anything - it literally takes seconds to repaint a window. Also, I can't rotate it unless I lower the resolution making it completely useless.

With both drivers I haven't had any luck to enable my third monitor connected to the other card.

Just curious, what are you waiting for from the open drivers ? AFAIK for your card (I'm guessing high end 5xx ?) they have caught up with fglrx in every area except gaming performance already.

Yes, the X1950 XTX, the highest-end r5xx card that was released back in the day.

- see above - the BIG issue
- cursor corruption - turns into a vertical hatched line or just garbled
- stable video output, so I don't have to worry about X crashing completely when I start playing something
- flicker free, high resolution video display capability with no crashes and no frame dropping
- yes, 3D acceleration - I want to play a game every now and again
- ability to switch to VT's and not just get black screens
- properly working compositing (not that fglrx is better)

I don't think anyone is saying "throw the card out", are we ? We're just saying "from this point on we're going to be delivering support via the open source drivers".

No, but if it won't work properly on my system in the future (as I said, impossible to remain with the same software configuration) what am I going to do? Now its good to hear that you will be providing "support" but I hope your support will be more proactive than just releasing further specs and then us having to wait another year for the features to be implemented.

[MostAwesomeDude]

Yes, the X1950 XTX, the highest-end r5xx card that was released back in the day.

- see above - the BIG issue
- cursor corruption - turns into a vertical hatched line or just garbled
- stable video output, so I don't have to worry about X crashing completely when I start playing something
- flicker free, high resolution video display capability with no crashes and no frame dropping
- yes, 3D acceleration - I want to play a game every now and again
- ability to switch to VT's and not just get black screens
- properly working compositing (not that fglrx is better)

Those all work for me with my X1950. Still, I hope you've been filing bugs if everything's broken for you.

[pawstar]

Those all work for me with my X1950. Still, I hope you've been filing bugs if everything's broken for you.

Using a dual-monitor setup? The driver isn't all that bad for a single monitor, but enabling dual-screens is what creates the mess for me.

However, I haven't actually been using the opensource drivers that much. Its been try it out -doesn't work, go back to fglrx.

With XAA, things are unbearable, enabling EXA the configuration get more usable. Part of the problem I think is due to my huge resolution for my main monitor (2560x1600) i.e. its using a dual-link connection. Dunno, there must be some bugs there. For one, I cant set a virtual resolution beyond 4060x1600 without getting the ridiculously slow redrawing on the screen - but this means I have overlap on my monitors

As an aside, I know I am not the only one having problems with the open source drivers:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-743504-highlight-radeonhd.html?sid=eafb8d421e4dc1432cc6b249680b38ad

some other threads as well.

P.S. I am just pulling in xf86-video-ati-6.12.0 which hit the portage tree so will see if it helps out.