AMD's Legacy Driver Will Not Support X Server 1.6

[MaestroMaus]

The thing that bothers me most is that the guys who are complaining here have missed the entire point of having open source drivers.

Let me sum things up for you:
1. Linux isn't good at the 3D graphics department right now. Quite honestly, Linux is the worst kid at school in de 3D graphics deparment (that's why the work on the new infrastructure it so goddamn much appreciated). If you use Linux purely out of practical reasons, then your hereby advised to start using Windows/Mac.

2. If you do care about the OSS philosophy, if you do see why it is important that OSS is created, maintained and used over CSS then you should use Linux. And when that is the case, you also understand that getting the specs from ATI is one of the best things they could have done for Linux/OSS. Losing their CSS driver is peanuts compared to it.

[Timo Jyrinki]

I think this is great progress! The fglrx is so shaky, that this results in better reputation of Linux overall - no more "Linux crashes so often" when the fglrx is actually the culprit.

For most ordinary 3D usage, r300-r500 OSS driver is good enough and stable already, and fast enough. It's just the lack of shaders which is preventing things like Doom 3 being fully usable. They will probably all come this year with a lot of radeon-rework Mesa work being already done, so people can stay in previous Linux versions with the crashing fglrx driver and wait for the Autumn releases, or upgrade now in the spring and be satisfied with the lower (1/2 or 1/3 or so) 3D performance for now.

_Hopefully_ this would also mean they can get rid of junk code in fglrx, so that the r600-r700 support would actually be what the users want.

[geamandura]

Worked on a radeon 2000 GPU tonight. It's a complete waste of silicon and using it for even web browsing is not a good thing.

Dude, you're full of fud. I own an HD 2600 XT silent and I'm playing a lot of games (admittedly not GTA 4, but GTR Evolution, Test Drive Unlimited, Fallout 3 etc.) in at least 1024 x 768 and sometimes with antialias. And always with full details.

So you've got something broken in there, maybe you've got a fall back to software rendering or a fall back to fud spreading on the webs, gotta have it checked!

[mirv]

I don't think AMD made this choice lightly - I'm quite sure they're aware of a backlash over older cards not being supported for the newer x server release. I also wonder if the "cutoff line" so to speak has anything to do with opengl3 support. So we can only wait and see what effect this will have with new drivers. I personally haven't had any problems with fglrx for quite some time now, though I would like to see the OSS drivers improve more than I want fglrx to get better.

[rafi]

Too bad, fglrx worked well with my x1600 mobility. I had hope in the 9-3 release, but now it's over Good bye PowerPlay, bye bye CCC...
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[Stormking]

when did you buy your old card? You've had the support you paid for so get over it.

When? When did I have my support? When was there ever a version of fglrx that was not broken in some way?

[mirv]

When? When did I have my support? When was there ever a version of fglrx that was not broken in some way?

And what problems have you had? What makes fglrx so terrible for you? Most people have been whining to get rid of the fglrx driver an concentrate on the open source ones - guess what, that just happened for r300/400/500 series cards.
And everybody has had support by AMD opening up documentation to allow for fully open source drivers to be properly developed, which they've been helping to develop in addition to their own closed source binaries. That's pretty supportive I think.

[Stormking]

And what problems have you had? What makes fglrx so terrible for you?

Well, right now it doesn't work at all. Before that, OpenGL didn't work with WINE. And before that, there was no support for Compositing or AIXGL. And before that, it crashed on a regular basis. And before that, XVideo-on-TV-Out was broken for 18 months. Not to mention that the *whole time*, logging out or trying to switch to the console froze the whole system.

Most people have been whining to get rid of the fglrx driver an concentrate on the open source ones

You seem to live in a parallel universe. In my world, people just want a working driver and don't really care if it's open source or not.

AMD opening up documentation to allow for fully open source drivers to be properly developed, which they've been helping to develop in addition to their own closed source binaries. That's pretty supportive I think.

So I have to be thankful that after not being able to deliver a working driver for about five years, ATI now finally decided to do the absolute minimum to help the OSS comunity to write their own driver?


Next time when you buy a brand new car and something is broken, try to imagine the manufacturer promises you to fix it "next month". Five years later - your car still doesn't work - they give you some papers and tell you to fix it yourself.

[grigi]

Other than 3D support (which a bunch of devs are working on now) where do you see the open source driver being deficient ?

In order of importance:

1. Power management
2. Redirected direct rendering (DRI2 & GEM/TTM)

Shaders (OpenGL2 / GLSL) would be nice too

[BlackStar]

In order of importance:

1. Power management
2. Redirected direct rendering (DRI2 & GEM/TTM)

Shaders (OpenGL2 / GLSL) would be nice too

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Redirected direct rendering indirection is on track (hey, why don't you make the acronym bigger, it's amusing!) OpenGL 3.0 support would be awesome, but I don't think it's gonna happen this year. GLSL at least, pretty please?