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AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

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  • How about we all drop the sillyness and get back on topic.

    What do you think about me saying 3 years is a better cut of date for driver suport?

    or the more controversial

    I am also vary happy that ATI has Open Source drivers. However, I don't think ATI should use them as some second horse to dump the work they don't feel like doing.
    Last edited by hunterthomson; 11 May 2009, 05:15 AM.

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    • Hunterthompson, I think the disconnect is that you're assuming we just walked away from 3xx-5xx support and left users totally dependent on the xorg/dri community. People are trying to tell you that is not the case, and that you may be jumping to conclusions a bit too quickly.

      Community developers like MostAwesomeDude are doing great things to advance the open source drivers (MostAwesomeDude is working on the first Gallium3D implementation for ATI/AMD parts) but there has also been a lot of work on the open source drivers done by AMD-employed and AMD-funded developers as well, and that work is continuing today.

      If you have a moment, it might be instructive to take a look at the commit logs for the drivers before reaching a final conclusion. Here's the open source "radeon" driver :

      http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...video-ati/log/

      Alex (agd5f) is, among other things, the maintainer of the "radeon" driver and for the last 15 months or so has worked for ATI/AMD, letting him spend more than just evenings and weekends on the open source drivers. We have two other developers working full time on the open source drivers as well, not counting the other technical folks involved in finalizing the programming documentation and helping with technical challenges, and also funded other open source driver work during 2007 and 2008.

      Our contribution to the open source drivers is most obvious in the X driver (the link above), and most of the work in the 3D stack is currently being done by non-AMD developers as part of an overall rewrite of the entire framework for all GPU vendors, but implying that we just walked away from users may be missing the point.
      Last edited by bridgman; 11 May 2009, 11:20 AM.
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      • oss drivers are really nice, but not NOW. the time is just not ready to replace fglrx. it looks like you put out specs, pay 2-3 dev and all is fine, that's definitely not working that way to keep up with other competitors.

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        • Originally posted by Kano View Post
          oss drivers are really nice, but not NOW. the time is just not ready to replace fglrx. it looks like you put out specs, pay 2-3 dev and all is fine, that's definitely not working that way to keep up with other competitors.
          But that doesn't change the fact that it's done. Can we all just deal with it and move on. Complaining about it here isn't going to change anything.

          Adm

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          • Well as ATI wants to provide new legacy win drivers for june, why not do a package for Linux too? I don't think that will be too hard.

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            • The Windows drivers will just contain bug and security fixes, no support for new OS bits. Like all legacy drivers, they will be built from a branch off the last mainline release (in this case the 9.3 Catalyst), not the ongoing mainline code. We could probably do a Linux build of that code but it would not contain any new X server, Xorg or Kernel support.

              We didn't think that would be very useful, and felt that putting effort into the open source drivers instead would be a better use of time.
              Last edited by bridgman; 11 May 2009, 02:36 PM.
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              • Well it would be more usefull than your other fglrx updates, as they are crap without 2.6.29+ support.

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                • I am glad to see this thead is back on topic.

                  Well, Ya your right that if your spending money on a copple Novel employees AMD/ATI is still doing work.
                  I am asumming that ATI has more money invested in and working on grafics cards made in 2008 and latter. So, while people who have a year and a half old grafics card may not be out in the cold they are camped out in the backyard. This is something Nvidia has not done nore ATI in the past. The last time you had a 3 year cut off date.

                  Although, I don't know all the facts. Maybe there was some big change form 2007 to 2008 so keeping suport for 3years was a realy big deal that would have ment there realy was no benifit to drop support for anything if they did that.
                  Last edited by hunterthomson; 11 May 2009, 04:29 PM.

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                  • Originally posted by bridgman View Post
                    We have two other developers working full time on the open source drivers as well
                    I don't want to offend anyone, but seriously I have not seen any real commits from Matthias Hopf and Egbert Eich in about a year or so. Alex Deucher (and Dave Airlie, Corbin Simpson) however are on fire

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                    • Originally posted by hunterthomson View Post
                      Well, Ya your right that if your spending money on a copple Novel employees AMD/ATI is still doing work. I am asumming that ATI has more money invested in and working on grafics cards made in 2008 and latter. So, while people who have a year and a half old grafics card may not be out in the cold they are camped out in the backyard. This is something Nvidia has not done nore ATI in the past. The last time you had a 3 year cut off date.
                      Originally posted by d2kx View Post
                      I don't want to offend anyone, but seriously I have not seen any real commits from Matthias Hopf and Egbert Eich in about a year or so. Alex Deucher (and Dave Airlie, Corbin Simpson) however are on fire
                      Alex, Richard and Cooper all work for AMD and work full time on the open source drivers. Cooper joined the open source effort recently, replacing another AMD employee who moved to the fglrx team. Richard is working on 6xx/7xx 3d support right now, while Alex and Cooper both work with older GPUs as well.

                      Matthias, Egbert and Luc played a key role in kicking off the open source graphics initiative as part of the long-standing partnership between AMD and Novell, and Matthias continued to work on the initial 6xx/7xx 3d engine documentation and support.

                      Originally posted by hunterthomson View Post
                      Although, I don't know all the facts. Maybe there was some big change form 2007 to 2008 so keeping suport for 3years was a realy big deal that would have ment there realy was no benifit to drop support for anything if they did that.
                      The big change (in 2006, really) was moving from the R3xx-based architecture (used for 3xx-5xx) to the unified shader architecture used for 6xx and higher. We kept the 3xx-5xx code base going much longer than normal, supporting 7 year old GPUs in our mainline driver in order to keep the code required for 5xx active and supported.

                      Nearly all of the R5xx GPUs were introduced in 2005, although there were some new board designs in 2006 to take advantage of newly available memory chips. I believe the X1950 Pro was the last new chip in the 5xx family, launched in Oct 2006.

                      The R600, RV610 and RV630 launched in May 2007.
                      Last edited by bridgman; 11 May 2009, 05:33 PM.
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