AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[MostAwesomeDude]

I think someone should start a donation website, where upset users can put money on AMD and nVidia OSS driver developers to speed up the process

But I doubt that even $10000 would change much. What is a GPU programmer paid a month? $10000?

And AMD's got 3 full time? Wow. My hat off to AMD!

I think AMD and nVidia are doing the right thing. I even impressed that they will continue to support legacy hardware.

And as Open Source? Can we really be this lucky?

I'm currently paid much less than $10,000 a month by Oregon State University to evangelize Open Source software in the community. So nine months out of the year X.org work must take a backseat to other work.

That said, bounties for X.org work have been discussed before, and there is a Vacation of Code program in place for getting money to developers who have specific targets to work on. I'm sure this will get brought up at XDS in September.

[gfxdrone]

For about 4 weeks I've been predicting a major move from AMD/ATI re their driver development for Linux systems. Not because of any technical reasons, but for the financial reasons one early poster in this thread mentioned.

AMD is losing market share to both Intel and nVidia last I checked, and that's in a declining market. Not a slowly declining market either, a radically collapsing one. They just dumped their chip fab plant. There is the question of the UAE investor's voices in this. These are the real issues here, obviously, though I haven't really followed AMD specifically that much recently in terms of where they are going financially.

One thing I learned long ago was that engineers who work for companies rarely have much sense of why such decisions really are made, but given this economic reality, and the rapidly collapsing global economy, which is not trivial and is not a joke, AMD has to take action, and this is an obvious cost cutting measure while still doing what they can do in terms of supporting end users. I've read threads here before where bridgeman gave some excellent and very accurate estimates for actual real world Linux market share, so rather than repeat those debates, I'd just point out that the numbers he gave were and are very accurate, and fit exactly with the real data I've seen, so that really has to put what resources AMD can allocate to the Linux driver groups into a context that can't just be ignored as something you don't want to look at or think about, these are real numbers, and AMD knows what they are, as do most other major entities that need such information. So I'm actually kind of impressed by the support AMD is committing to even now, it's pretty decent in my opinion given these economic realities.

I wanted to be mad about this, and I kind of am annoyed because I have to buy / upgrade my current ATI testing card, but that's really the only reason I'm annoyed, this was totally predictable, and I'm glad to see that things are moving more or less as expected in terms of what decisions the AMD corporation is taking in terms of trying to keep things going.

Must be a tough situation bridgeman, good luck, I think in practical terms, this is about as good a solution as you could hope to do in such a serious economic downturn, AMD isn't a charity or non-profit corporation, so you have to allocate your resources as well as you can, and this is a good way to do it.

Obviously, I'd never consider or recommend a high end ATI card based on this support level, but I would never recommend that anyway, so that's not changed, but the radeon/radeonhd stuff is fine for most average users.

One thing I found notably absent in this long thread was actual technical comparisons between the current radeon/radeonhd and fglrx compared to Windows performance, that kind of answers all the real questions in terms of what you really got for your money. I don't have this real data, I'd be interested to see the comparisons between XP/Vista/Linux for various cards and drivers just to see what percent of the full performance each system is going to get, and now is getting.

But free drivers are nice for the long term, and it's about as good as you can hope to achieve at this point, nobody was planning on a global full scale economic collapse, and it's not going to get much better in the near future (and if you think it is, maybe I can try to sell you some stocks and a house or two...), so AMD has to take action, and they have. Good choice I think, too bad for the end users who were expecting full support but I never believed that in the first place so that's what it is, as bridgeman said, they never promised it.

To the posters who said NVidia has dropped support for their cards, what are you talking about, they are running on 2.6.29 and xorg 1.6 except for the very oldest series I believe, and even that might get a new legacy release, I don't know that status. That goes back a long way now, we're talking seriously old hardware that still is running on the latest kernels and xorg versions, though maybe the very oldest stuff will be dropped, but that's very old now, the 400 series is still running, I think earlier is fine too.

And no, it's absolutely correct to point out that should nVidia drop support, all users would essentially be screwed, since there is no free xorg nvidia driver worth discussing, no 3d driver that really works yet, and no specs for the cards. But they have supported, and continue to support, their cards very well with non free drivers, I talk to almost nobody, except apparently a few people in this thread, who regrets buying nVidia, nobody. I know people have issues, that aren't fixed sometimes, but I can speak for a large group of people, and they don't in general have that many issues, and most have none that I am aware of. So that's what it is.

But free drivers are an inherently good and desirable thing, so I really think AMD is doing the best they can do in this situation, mad as it might make some people, for very good reason, but you have to see the bigger picture sometimes, and if it really makes you mad, get nVidia, but if you want 3d free xorg drivers, AMD is an excellent option now.

[Stormking]

Let me add something here. About 70% of this thread is people whining about this step.

As I said before, this is not "people whining", this is customers who never got what they paid for. Who were put off for years.

It gets kind of tiring after a while to read all the negativity.

It got kind of tiring, soon, to try the new fglrx each month just to get disappointed, again.

I mean, this is becoming ridiculous. The specs are there for pretty much everything and for everyone to see.

I am not interested in doing driver development. I am interested in being able to use a product I paid money for.

AMD doing the _right_ step to be able to deliver overall better performance with fglrx

I don't care for the well-being of AMD or the performance of a driver I cannot use. Don't you people get it? 90% of the users are simply not interested in any of this closed vs. open source sh*t or the long-term-development of AMD. They just want a working driver for the hardware they own now.

[Stormking]

"I paid money so you should grovel at my feet!" That's the sort of attitude I'm seeing in some of this. Absurd.

No, it's not!

ATI promised their hardware to work with Linux. Had I known about the crappy shape of the driver when I went shopping, I never had bought a laptop with ATI graphics in in. But it seemed not that bad because the driver got updated regulary and one could suspect that thing were getting better ...

... except they never got. As I said before, something was allways broken. Right now, fglrx does not work for me at all. But over the years, I learned patience.

But then I had to read that all my patience in all those years was absolutely pointless. AMD will never deliver a driver that supports the main features of my hardware and just works.

[MostAwesomeDude]

As I said before, this is not "people whining", this is customers who never got what they paid for. Who were put off for years.

It got kind of tiring, soon, to try the new fglrx each month just to get disappointed, again.

I am not interested in doing driver development. I am interested in being able to use a product I paid money for.

I don't care for the well-being of AMD or the performance of a driver I cannot use. Don't you people get it? 90% of the users are simply not interested in any of this closed vs. open source sh*t or the long-term-development of AMD. They just want a working driver for the hardware they own now.

Your rousing rhetoric has redoubled my resolve. I shall drop out of school, shut myself in my room, and live off ramen and water until the drivers utilize the full capabilities of the hardware.

Oh, wait. I already live off ramen and water. Shoot. Guess I'll have to find some other way to make it evident that I already spend most of my spare time on this project.

[Stormking]

Your rousing rhetoric has redoubled my resolve. I shall drop out of school, shut myself in my room, and live off ramen and water until the drivers utilize the full capabilities of the hardware.

Oh, wait. I already live off ramen and water. Shoot. Guess I'll have to find some other way to make it evident that I already spend most of my spare time on this project.

What do you want from me? I did not say a word against the open source driver or any other spare time project.

[Jon4u!SvenJonsson]

We will have an answer for you needs soon

That sounds interesting. Do you have more details ? Eg USB-distro or cd-based, i386 or x86_64. I would spend some more time on producing useable bug-reports if it was easier. Currently i have to uninstall fglrx, reboot, wait, get the crash, reboot see if theres some useable information and report. Some sort of semiautomatic distro with latest components and debugging enabled would be easier. Keep me updatet on this topic if possible.

Cheers Jon

[smitty3268]

AMD will never deliver a driver that supports the main features of my hardware and just works.

I suspect AMD would argue that the open source radeon driver will support all the main features "eventually", and "just work", and is substantially assisted by AMD. So your dream need not die if you don't want it to.

I suspect you do though. And really, it's been quite a while so I can't completely blame you.

[Stormking]

I suspect AMD would argue that the open source radeon driver will support all the main features "eventually", and "just work", and is substantially assisted by AMD. So your dream need not die if you don't want it to.

Don't get me wrong, I am extremely thankful to the people behind the open source driver. But this thread is not about them, it's about ATI/AMD and their continued failure to deliver a working driver.

And I just can't stand the arguments about how great this step is for fglrx because it will be so stable and small and fast. I don't care because I will not benefit from this.

[oyvind]

<snip>

I once actually had a hope of an OK working Linux driver that performs well and doesn't have glaring bugs that always pops up to say hello, before the laptop becomes obsolete.

After chucking fglrx out of the window for the last time because of support closing down, I have settled on latest radeonhd git snapshot using EXA acceleration and a plain non-composited desktop (Compiz tends to cause Xorg-freezes with both radeon and radeonhd, which is unacceptable for me). The 2D acceleration is pretty good, and radeonhd does not have corruption issues, which makes it that much more usable. I have decided to not care about the 3D performance, for now.

One issue that plagues me with radeonhd, though, is that XVideo tears badly and I cannot get OpenGL to VSYNC properly, no matter how hard I try. I am running latest DRM git snapshot (drm.ko and radeon.ko), perhaps this is not a good idea. I get these errors when trying to force VSYNC through the vblank_mode environment variable:

[32805.529145] [drm] wait for fifo failed status : 0xB0116100 0x00020000
[32813.315968] [drm] wait for fifo failed status : 0x9401C100 0x00020000
[32815.757155] [drm] wait idle failed status : 0x9401C100 0x00020000
[32816.444242] [drm] wait for fifo failed status : 0x9401C100 0x00020000

So I'll have to accept that I cannot watch movies on this laptop. Hopefully, something which fixes this will arrive in radeonhd.


Goodbye fglrx, it's been.. eh.. interesting.
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X1400/M54-GL