AMD To Drop Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Catalyst Support

[DINAMIK]

this kind of support is also planned in windows platform, due to there is not official support for hd 4000 series in windows 8

[Fenrin]

Even Ubuntu 12.04 will be supported for 5 years, so that means until April 2017...

That's very good. So that means that a maintained Ubuntu release will be probably compatible with Catalyst <12.7 until April 2017. And Catalyst <12.7 should be also compatible with maintained releases of RHEL based distros even much longer.

Then no much reason to worry about this step then.

[Death Knight]

You don't needed to be sad. Even with my 6850HD, (I bought almost a year ago) you cannot use Gnome3 Shell. FGLRX bugs kills the shell and force me logging out at the middle of coding, fu*king my concentration...
So, fglrx "support" is not an actually "support". They better drop whole catalyst for linux.
Instead, they could donate some $ to open source ati GPU driver coders... I call this a real linux support...

[susikala]

Regardless of the typical phoronix newsmongering paparazzi going on, the responses here just prove people will complain whatever happens. Before AMD open sourced their specs, it was evil AMD bluh bluh bluh. Then when it finally happened, it turned out most of it was talking. Very few people actually delved into the specs and did some work, otherwise the drivers wouldn't need so much time to mature. Then AMD drops blob support, which is the expected things to do after you open source your specs, and what happens? people complain.

This shows something I've been suspecting for quite a while (though phoronix really tries hard to bring out that side in people) -- there are idiots in every community, and usually roughly the same percentage (with the exception of ievil users, the number of idiots there is more like 90%).

[whizse]

It's the same story with the Unigine Engine on open-source, at least not without greatly sacrificing the visual richness of the engines and building Mesa support with patent-encumbered features (S3TC, floating-point textures, etc).

Or, you know, you could get Mesa from a distro that doesn't disable float textures. Also, there's no need to recompile for S3TC...

[AlbertP]

I think support for AGP cards was dropped by the proprietary driver long time ago, but maybe I am wrong. Gnome shell works very good with the free Radeon driver.

AGP support wasn't dropped yet. Radeon HD 2000+ is still working with Catalyst 12.3 (etc.), no matter what interface, PCIe or AGP, you use.

[bulletxt]

Wait, I know what's happening:

Valve is about to release Steam for Linux, so users will need full 3d support. How can AMD make money out of this "historical" situation? SIMPLE: kill the driver for 70% users out there and force them to buy a new GPU because the OSS driver won't be able to run Valve's games!

Bingo.

[oliver]

I don't mind AMD dropping HD2000 and 3000 support, but HD4000 support kinda sucks. A lot of IGP and laptops that are far from obsolete still use that chipset.

A year more would have been better maybe? Phenom II and it's supported chipset does go back to HD4000 more or less.


As for people complaining about AMD's support ... They have been great. More then great even. They've released specs, they've got people working for them, paying them money, to work on the open source drivers. What else can you want? Yes, more driver developers payed by AMD would be better. More Open source driver developers in the community would be awesome too, but .... lack of manpower or knowledgeable dev's is what's lacking there. Heck, AMD even supports coreboot!

Compare that to nVidia. What do they for the community? .... Nothing. That's right. They don't 'stop' nouveau, they said, but there's no specs drops, no payed developers. Just some enthousiastic users because back then they had nVidia cards that where 'better' then other cards. Or whatever pushed them back then (Its good we have people like that). nVidia's CEO once said (and I'd love to find that quote again), that he'd never do opensource drivers, he saw it more of an disease if anything (opensourcesness of stuff).

And intel, yes they have some reasonable support, but even they had some nasty binary blob mess with polousbo (sp).


So yes, it sucks that HD4000 support is being dropped, but AMD still deserves praise and love for their opensource involvement.

[Fixxer_Linux]

I thought that the fglrx driver was some so-called "unified" driver.
I did understood at first that the same code was able to make run any card, only by the calls made to the BIOS of the card.
Making them write the same driver for many cards.

So, what's the point in dropping older cards?
HD2/3/4k are not that old.

What will be their gain in the driver of dropping that ?
I perfectly understand that they do perhaps hope the customers will buy new cards just to get support.
Not me.
If i'm forced to drop my card just because lack of support, I will never buy ATI again. Be it either on processors or on GFX cards. I hate being force to change my hardware because of lack of support.

[elanthis]

I thought that the fglrx driver was some so-called "unified" driver.

Which basically just means that it's a single package that has a shit load of different drivers in it, sharing what little they can.

Think of it like Mesa. Tons of code shared across all drivers, but yet there's still separate drivers for r100, r300, r600, and now r800. And one of those is no longer supported iirc (the old r100/radeon driver).

The more code you have, the more crap you have to maintain. If there is a diminishing commercial appeal to spending money maintaining large swaths of legacy code, then that code is going to get dropped.

NVIDIA does the exact same thing, btw. They have three or four separate driver series for Linux now. The older ones I believe get small patches to the Open Source kernel bridge code, but otherwise get no new features or support. AMD's proprietary driver also has a small Open Source bridge, so porting it forward may be feasible (not sure about the X.org part though).

If i'm forced to drop my card just because lack of support, I will never buy ATI again. Be it either on processors or on GFX cards. I hate being force to change my hardware because of lack of support.

You're kinda fucked, then. NVIDIA does it. Intel does it (they're okay on Linux, but they abandon their GPUs on Windows every new release; I have DX10.1-capable Intel hardware that only ships with an old buggy GL 3.0 driver, for no fucking reason besides Intel being cheap and incompetent). Everybody does it.