AMD Catalyst 9.10 dropped in Ubuntu 9.10

[RealNC]

Well, if in half a year the open drivers will have catched up to Catalyst, then of course not. But somehow I suspect they won't make it in 6 months. Probably in 2 years maybe (if ever).

[bridgman]

Depends what you mean by "caught up". The open drivers will probably never catch up to fglrx in *all* respects, but they should get to the point where they run more or less the same apps with decent performance.

Most users seem to feel that the open drivers are better than fglrx on 3xx-5xx already for everything except 3D. On the 3D side, the two main deficiencies are lack of GLSL support and a bunch of missing extensions, mostly of which were blocked waiting for GEM/TTM (and, indirectly, KMS). Once those areas are improved, I think the open source driver support will be "close enough" for nearly all users.

Nobody knows what the schedule will be, but I expect it will be closer to 6 months than 2 years.

[yotambien]

Nobody knows what the schedule will be, but I expect it will be closer to 6 months than 2 years.

The lower bound has already been exceeded. Catalyst 9.3, the last driver supporting R300-R500 cards was released on 27th of March 2009. Six months was two weeks ago.

[RealNC]

Well, then the main criticism remains valid. You can't tell users that it doesn't matter that their X1950 (for example) was dropped from Catalyst because they can use the open drivers. That would imply that all owners of such a GPU don't run 3D games/applications (Wine or native). These cards are slow as it is by modern standards. Losing additional 3D performance due to the open drivers totally kills them off, even though they are not *that* weak. An X1950 can actually run some modern games quite well.

Of course you want to sell new cards (and with NVidia's GT300 looming in the horizon you will have major problems doing so ), but you can't claim that dropping support from Catalyst doesn't matter :P You can tell us that it's a necessary evil, but *not* that it doesn't matter.

[bridgman]

The lower bound has already been exceeded. Catalyst 9.3, the last driver supporting R300-R500 cards was released on 27th of March 2009. Six months was two weeks ago.

Yes, by changing the baseline you can make the numbers say anything you want. The open source driver support can be "a million years late" if you want

I read the previous posts as "2 years from now", perhaps that was incorrect.

Well, then the main criticism remains valid. You can't tell users that it doesn't matter that their X1950 (for example) was dropped from Catalyst because they can use the open drivers. That would imply that all owners of such a GPU don't run 3D games/applications (Wine or native). These cards are slow as it is by modern standards. Losing additional 3D performance due to the open drivers totally kills them off, even though they are not *that* weak. An X1950 can actually run some modern games quite well.

I don't think we have ever said "it doesn't matter". I certainly haven't.

Of course you want to sell new cards (and with NVidia's GT300 looming in the horizon you will have major problems doing so ), but you can't claim that dropping support from Catalyst doesn't matter :P You can tell us that it's a necessary evil, but *not* that it doesn't matter.

See above. I don't think we have ever presented reduction of support for older GPUs as anything but a necessary evil. Everyone does it, typically on architectural boundaries, and it just happened to be our turn to drop support. I said at the time that the decision to focus on the open source drivers would probably be an unpopular one in the short term but would probably look like the correct decision in the longer term once things like video decode acceleration over Gallium3D started to appear.

[mirv]

I'll drop into the discussion and say that if people remember the original r200 driver days, they were basically the fastest drivers (open source or otherwise) around - albeit with a few bugs. And they were open source. So being open source doesn't mean "slower". Just wanted to clear that one up.

[yotambien]

The lower bound has already been exceeded. Catalyst 9.3, the last driver supporting R300-R500 cards was released on 27th of March 2009. Six months was two weeks ago.

Yes, by changing the baseline you can make the numbers say anything you want. The open source driver support can be "a million years late" if you want

I read the previous posts as "2 years from now", perhaps that was incorrect.

Or a million years earlier. I understood you in the first place, but you'll have to agree that it makes more sense to count from when support was actually dropped than from a random point at which somebody asked in a forum. Imagine a Phoronix article some time from now reading "Open source developers have completed their work on the radeon driver, bringing its feature set and performance for R300-R500 cards comparable to where the proprietary driver left it, only 6 months after RealNC asked about it in our forums".

[bridgman]

The problem is that measuring from "when support was dropped" is kind of a vague thing as well. Measuring from the last release that *did* include support is wrong, since support was not dropped then.

Measuring from the April catalyst driver is an option, since that's where the support was first dropped, but measuring from June or July probably makes more sense, since that is when the first quarterly update would have happened. Even that is hard to quantify, since what we're doing for Windows is "critical app and security fixes", not adding support for new OS and SP versions, so even ignoring market share differences and applying the same effort to Linux would not give the kind of timely X and kernel support that everyone wants to use as a baseline. Linux relies on open source drivers rather than ABI compatibility, so that's the model we're using for ongoing 3xx-5xx/rs6xx support.

The concept of "today" seems easy by comparison

[zapbrannigan99]

the Ubuntu9.10 internal driver Radeon is full featured there is no need for the FGLRX/catalyst driver.

in fakt AMD drop the FGLRX support in 9-3 for your Cart "R300"

Thanks for the reply, didnt realise it would start a long discussion. The open source driver is fine for R300 (x1270 radeon) when using compiz effects in Ubuntu.

Where it really falls down is using an app like google earth - maybe ~10fps if lucky. This is considerably slower than my old intel 82855 igp on a laptop that i also have Ubuntu that dates back to 2003 .

Should we expect a big push from the open source driver in terms of performance, or throw it away and buy a new laptop lol.

Can see AMD's point of dropping support for older devices, but if would be nice if they released the binary driver as source for older devices...maybe this would give the open source guys a hand

[dosenpfand]

I dont know if someone mentioned that before but fixing resolution and refreh rate on Crts with broken EDID, with XRandR, works again with this driver.

I wrote that because i know that some poeple still use CRTs and some were complaining about this.

All in all a goof release


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