AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[kraftman]

Legacy does not mean unsupported for nvidia. There have been plenty of updates for your cards and are still presently being updated.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122606

It's worth to notice AMD provide MUCH greater support for r500 cards. OS driver is in some cases far better than fglrx and you don't have to install closed blobs. Dropping support for R300-R500 cards is great news, because they'll focus on OS drivers which are great and will grow in quality faster now.

[chrisr]

Tear-free, in any sense.

Sorry, I thought we were talking about tear-free video (which is enabled by default). Tear-free EXA is disabled by default but there is an option to enable it.

Yes, I have noticed the Open-Source "tear-free" XVideo support and it's fine. However, enabling EXAVsync makes my X-server non-responsive with the Radeon 9550 in my desktop.

But it's the sudden loss of OpenGL support for R500 chips from fglrx that really annoys me. Mesa's 3D support simply isn't good enough to play World of Warcraft any more, ever since the release of "Wrath of the Lich King". Nor is the Gallium code going to be ready to replace it by the end of April. So a rather expensive and not particularly old laptop will probably now be gathering dust until it is...

[bridgman]

Yes, I have noticed the Open-Source "tear-free" XVideo support and it's fine. However, enabling EXAVsync makes my X-server non-responsive with the Radeon 9550 in my desktop.

Yeah, syncing the acceleration calls isn't real efficient, but until we get a better compositing stack that does the tear-free stuff via page flipping I *think* that's the best that can be done in the driver alone.

Have you ever played with any of the XRender based compositors ? I'm thinking that might be the best approach for tear-free on older hardware.

But it's the sudden loss of OpenGL support for R500 chips from fglrx that really annoys me. Mesa's 3D support simply isn't good enough to play World of Warcraft any more, ever since the release of "Wrath of the Lich King". Nor is the Gallium code going to be ready to replace it by the end of April. So a rather expensive and not particularly old laptop will probably now be gathering dust until it is...

So here's what I don't understand. We're not sending kill codes out to your systems or anything, so if the driver works today then it's going to work in April as well. None of the supported distros do package updates of kernel or X server so AFAIK the system should just keep running unless you decide that you absolutely have to upgrade the OS to a new distro release.

Even if we kept fglrx alive for 3xx-5xx in the legacy branch we would still be looking at quarterly-ish updates, so it would be more like June-ish until you could upgrade anyways, and by that time a lot of the in-flight open source work should be starting to show up in a useable form. I understand being upset that you can't upgrade to a new distro as quickly as you might like but I'm still having trouble understanding the "gathering dust" part...

[Redeeman]

Yeah, syncing the acceleration calls isn't real efficient, but until we get a better compositing stack that does the tear-free stuff via page flipping I *think* that's the best that can be done in the driver alone.

Have you ever played with any of the XRender based compositors ? I'm thinking that might be the best approach for tear-free on older hardware.



So here's what I don't understand. We're not sending kill codes out to your systems or anything, so if the driver works today then it's going to work in April as well. None of the supported distros do package updates of kernel or X server so AFAIK the system should just keep running unless you decide that you absolutely have to upgrade the OS to a new distro release.

Even if we kept fglrx alive for 3xx-5xx in the legacy branch we would still be looking at quarterly-ish updates, so it would be more like June-ish until you could upgrade anyways, and by that time a lot of the in-flight open source work should be starting to show up in a useable form. I understand being upset that you can't upgrade to a new distro as quickly as you might like but I'm still having trouble understanding the "gathering dust" part...

Because some people dont just use their computer for X set of things, 100% locked. Some people might have changing needs, and if suddenly they cant just do pretty much everything possible, the computer is useless to them.. allthough i'd hardly call world of warcraft something like that.. besides, considering fglrx's current quality, this is hardly a loss of significance.

i'd say this choice makes sense, especially if AMD as result devotes just a tad more resources towards the free drivers.

[energyman]

so what? ou can install any other distro. You might not be able to update it, but you don't really loose anything. Everything that works NOW will continue to work. You NEED a new version of some software - well, confiugure&&make&&make install works great - if you don't forget to install the abomination called '-dev packets'.

[chrisr]

It's the kernel.

So here's what I don't understand. We're not sending kill codes out to your systems or anything, so if the driver works today then it's going to work in April as well.

Except that there's no guarantee that fglrx will compile against the 2.6.29+ kernels. In fact, I'm not even sure if it will compile against a 2.6.28 kernel!

None of the supported distros do package updates of kernel or X server so AFAIK the system should just keep running unless you decide that you absolutely have to upgrade the OS to a new distro release.

I can believe that for the X server, but that sounds like nonsense for the kernel. There's a small matter of bug and security fixes which are released at random intervals. (And which my distro does fix.) So basically either my laptop gets stuck with the last kernel that is still compatible with fglrx, along with all that kernel's known bugs, or I upgrade and lose OpenGL support.

[energyman]

it does compile against 2.6.28. And nobody forces you to update to 2.6.29.

[bridgman]

I can believe that for the X server, but that sounds like nonsense for the kernel. There's a small matter of bug and security fixes which are released at random intervals. (And which my distro does fix.) So basically either my laptop gets stuck with the last kernel that is still compatible with fglrx, along with all that kernel's known bugs, or I upgrade and lose OpenGL support.

Sorry, my wording was a bit ambiguous. Yes distros provide security fixes, and yes those usually involve kernel updates, but that is normally done by backporting specific fixes to a copy of the current kernel rather than a bump to an all-new kernel tree. That's not the case for all distros but AFAIK it is for all the distros we support. I will double-check this tomorrow.

Which distro do you use, btw ?

[some-guy]

I kind of find this situation odd.

Everybody was saying to completely drop fglrx, and now that amd dropped r300-r500 support, they're angry

I think that the legacy branch should be updated for newer X servers and kernels, otherwise this is a good move

[chrisr]

Fedora 10

Which distro do you use, btw ?

I am a Fedora user, and I am expecting the kernel version to be bumped up to the 2.6.28.x series at some point in this release.

As for "nobody forcing me to...(yada yada)", nobody forced me to upgrade my laptop to Fedora 9, and so it stayed running Fedora 8 until Fedora 10 was released. At that point I was forced to upgrade because the supply of security fixes for F8 dried up. Fortunately, fglrx was providing an Xorg 7.4 driver by that point, even if I did need to hack the packaging scripts manually before I could use it.