AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[Saist]

Great.... So is AMD/ATI going to do this again in the future? Are we going to be forced to upgrade our cards every 1.5-2 years in order to get the [current] benefits of the Catalyst driver? Really, the HD 2000's were released in 2007, that is not long ago at all. Not to mention, most who buy pre-built PC's or laptops usually get cards from many months or years before. For example, I bought my Dell laptop in May 2007, and they gave me a radeon xpress 1150 which was released in May 2006! On the other hand, I will be building my next computer and will then have more of a decision on how recent my card will be.

I don't currently use the ATI Catalyst driver and this card isn't so great enough that I would use it for gaming, so I will just stick to the xf86 ati driver. Of course, I don't know if I could even use Compiz again without fglrx. But as for the next card I will purchase, well, it depends on Nvidia's response to this news. Will they drop support for 'old' hardware? If not, I might consider changing my wish list.

Thank you ATI, for finally making clear that you are just a bunch of %$?%$?&! Thank you for failing to deliver a decent driver for five years, now. Thank you for showing what kind of support your customers can expect in the future.

Thank you for nothing but hours and hours of trying to get you piece of %$?/& working.

Don't worry, I will not bother you, again. Because I will never need a driver from you, again.

Directed at both of you.

Nvidia has done this driver dropping thing for 3 releases now, .76, .96, and now 1.7x. They have ALREADY DONE THIS.

In addition, Nvidia doesn't even have an OSS driver for you to go to. So you have to either upgrade your Nvidia card to a newer version, or hope that Nvidia updates the legacy drivers, which could leave you months with no driver support.


By comparison, the last time ATi dropped a driver was back in 2006, and it was for an architecture from 2001.

So get over yourselves and quit trolling.

[kraftman]

I believe that also has an adverse affect on linux because we are such a small market segment. I know that it also takes alot of time and resources to support legacy hardware, and with limited resources it doesn't make financial sense for ATI/AMD to keep supporting it.

It looks windows is small market segment too:

...the mainline Catalyst driver on both Linux and Windows will stop supporting cards older than the Radeon HD 2000 series.

Thanks to Open Source drivers Linux is in far better position here I have no doubt, AMD is one of the most Linux friendly companies.

[Svartalf]

Both ATI/AMD and NVidia drop support for old hardware -- it just happens to be our turn. There's probably someone at NVidia reading this and thinking "whew, now we can drop some old GPUs"

Heh... I had the same line of thought there.

This case was a bit different from the norm because the 3xx-5xx architecture worked well for so many years, from 2002 through 2006, so in many cases the same driver code that supported 7 year old products also supported relatively recent products as well.

It's actually impressive that you had a lineup that could have been supported reasonably well for the span of 7 years. For those that're griping about this, it's been something that you HAD to know was coming. This is the reality of the proprietary driver scene- it's part of why I'm eager to see FOSS drivers picking up some speed on the AMD parts. AMD can't afford to keep supporting a chip design they no longer really sell to the public including OEMs.

It just means we all as a community need to pull the FOSS driver story more together on those chips a little quicker. That's all.

And for me in the medium term, it means my R420 and Rv515 boards will have to come out of the machines they're in if there's a single issue with the fglrx driver that has the support. My R600 board I bought recently has serious issues with user switching (The other Radeons don't...) using fglrx so if there's an issue they'll have to be stat-bagged and held in the hopes that the Gallium3D support gels quickly for them.

[GreatWalrus]

Directed at both of you.

Nvidia has done this driver dropping thing for 3 releases now, .76, .96, and now 1.7x. They have ALREADY DONE THIS.

In addition, Nvidia doesn't even have an OSS driver for you to go to. So you have to either upgrade your Nvidia card to a newer version, or hope that Nvidia updates the legacy drivers, which could leave you months with no driver support.


By comparison, the last time ATi dropped a driver was back in 2006, and it was for an architecture from 2001.

So get over yourselves and quit trolling.

I'm not trolling. I am contributing to the discussion - learn the difference.
And as noted by the last comment on page 6, Nvidia's "dropped drivers" continue to work and will most likely work for a while to come. On the other hand, ATI's dropped driver will stop working whenever there is a new kernel or xorg release.

[Stormking]

So get over yourselves and quit trolling.

For five years ATI promised a working driver (it never really did). Then they had their amazing new codebase that was supposed to do everything better (it never did) and now, after five years of dealing with their crappy &?%/, they just drop support for my hardware.

And getting upset over this confession of failure is trolling? Whats's next, are you coming over to actually spit in my face? Because that's what you're doing, verbally, right now.

[bridgman]

With respect, I don't think we ever promised anything except to keep improving Linux support, did we ?

The "amazing new codebase" was the 3D stack, not the rest of the driver and AFAIK that's the part everyone is upset about losing from fglrx, isn't it ?

We aren't dropping support for your hardware, as much as saying "from this point on we will be supporting your hardware via the open source driver, which we just spent a pile of time, money and effort on...".

[deanjo]

Directed at both of you.

Nvidia has done this driver dropping thing for 3 releases now, .76, .96, and now 1.7x. They have ALREADY DONE THIS.

In addition, Nvidia doesn't even have an OSS driver for you to go to. So you have to either upgrade your Nvidia card to a newer version, or hope that Nvidia updates the legacy drivers, which could leave you months with no driver support.


By comparison, the last time ATi dropped a driver was back in 2006, and it was for an architecture from 2001.

So get over yourselves and quit trolling.

Moving to legacy with nvidia does not mean drop of support. Nvidia still maintains drivers dating back to the TNT era (1998). Take a look at the driver release dates. This is something that ati has no intention of doing.

[remm]

Directed at both of you.

Nvidia has done this driver dropping thing for 3 releases now, .76, .96, and now 1.7x. They have ALREADY DONE THIS.

Obviously, these people don't know what they are talking about ...

More seriously, if you are interested in Linux and open source, then you should buy your hardware thinking about using it with open source drivers. Otherwise, there's really no point, you could use Windows with the same open source applications that you use on Linux. The only use of the blobs are for waiting for open drivers to get there when the hardware is new.

I expect Larabee will kill NV and AMD in the Linux market.

[Stormking]

With respect, I don't think we ever promised anything except to keep improving Linux support, did we ?

The problem is, it never did improve. *Something* was allways broken. Like the video overlay on tv-out, which did not work properly for 18 months. The inability to switch between text console and X. The system freezes when one simply wanted to log out. You just seem not to get how crappy fglrx is.

But those were the good times, right now it does not work for me at all. Again, you failed to even notice the problem for 3 months, than it was supposed to be fixed but wasn't and now you're officially dropping support.

[russofris]

Someone may wish to explain to AMD that x1000 is not a legacy architecture. Products are being released with this tech "today"

New HP product, just launched. By AMD's definition it's legacy before hitting the store shelves.

http://geizhals.at/at/a408280.html

Frank