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AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

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  • #91
    Originally posted by Melf View Post
    All in all I am quite pleased. I finally managed to achieve my main obejective, to have:
    *stability
    *suspend,hibernation
    *good video playback
    *compiz
    all at the same time.
    I would say that the open source radeon driver is not bad at all!
    I just went to look at the status of the radeon driver for r500 series & you're right, it looks really good! I'd switch drivers right now if powerplay was working.

    That puts my mind at ease.

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    • #92
      Originally posted by drag View Post
      Actually I would not think it's coding what is needed (well that is needed, but end users can't typically code). Anyways most people do not have the ability to do that.

      What is needed from most people is going to be feedback.

      For example:

      Say you have a video card that freezes when you try to do 3D. Who is going to help you fix it if you sit on your hands and don't file reports or do anything about it?

      NOBODY.

      NOBODY IS GOING TO FIX ANYTHING IF THEY ARE UNAWARE OF IT.


      ---------------------------------


      What is needed is the ability for people to run lots of tests on different hardware with the same exact software setup. So that developers can know easier which hardware is the problem and stuff like that.

      They don't even need to be particularly good bug reports. Numbers make up for it.

      So say you get 300 bug reports from different people. They are shitty bug reports, but you know the user and the hardware. Well if 200 of those people are having problems with the same chipset on their cards... then that helps to narrow down the problem significantly, right?


      SOOOOO.....

      What I am getting at is this:

      Is there any Live Linux distribution out there right now for testing video hardware?

      I want a Live Linux cdrom that is built with the latest and greatest open source drivers and comes with a bunch of benchmarking and hardware testing tools installed. So that a individual can download the image, drop it on a USB key or on a CDROM and then just engage in a bunch of testing.

      Something quick and easy that does not require a bunch of Linux skills or require installing software over a existing system. Something even a typical Windows user can handle.


      If that does not exist then I want to make one. I want to take Phoronix's benchmark tools and make a live CD/USB Key with the latest and greatest X Windows and OpenGL drivers.
      We will have an answer for you needs soon
      Michael Larabel
      https://www.michaellarabel.com/

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      • #93
        Wow... so much negativity here. While I understand that people are frustrated at AMD for the problems each person has had with their drivers... there seems to be no recognition from what I understand are real challenges supporting the quirks of various distributions, kernels, and a changing graphics stack. Really for all the architectural issues people are trying to address in the rest of the stack, it's impressive what they do put out. (Windows, with it's slow rate of change and single distribution (sort of) seems like a dream).

        And what is AMD's reaction to this landscape - they open their documentation and produce an open source driver. OK - it's not perfect yet, but they have grabbed onto philosophy that many feel is the better way to go, and are making that the key driver. And as the Linux landscape evolves... the open source driver should evolve right along with it.

        Does it make more sense to fix the old driver? or work on the open source one and get it up to snuff sooner (which, it sounds like it is doing pretty good)

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        • #94
          As they do not provide updates for legacy drivers this will lead to endless user supported kernel patches for 9-3 driver. You can guess that i really hate that. If you do a Debian Lenny based distribution running latest kernel and fully without ATIs support that a dramtic issue what they are doing. Except Xserver 1.6+ support for 71.xx driver series Nv supports all GPU - maybe not with added extra drivers. But those are old DX7 cards, R500 is a DX10 card and they drop support for everything below a DX10.1. Somebody should _sue_ ATI, really thats unfair if you can not use a newer Xserver, DRM, Mesa on a specific distro. The driver is not even in a fully working state and then drop support? Thats absolutely ridiculous!

          Comment


          • #95
            Originally posted by Craig73 View Post
            Wow... so much negativity here. While I understand that people are frustrated at AMD for the problems each person has had with their drivers... there seems to be no recognition from what I understand are real challenges supporting the quirks of various distributions, kernels, and a changing graphics stack. Really for all the architectural issues people are trying to address in the rest of the stack, it's impressive what they do put out. (Windows, with it's slow rate of change and single distribution (sort of) seems like a dream).

            And what is AMD's reaction to this landscape - they open their documentation and produce an open source driver. OK - it's not perfect yet, but they have grabbed onto philosophy that many feel is the better way to go, and are making that the key driver. And as the Linux landscape evolves... the open source driver should evolve right along with it.

            Does it make more sense to fix the old driver? or work on the open source one and get it up to snuff sooner (which, it sounds like it is doing pretty good)

            I know how you feel. What follows is my flame-off on the author of the SMXI / SGFXI script after listening a whine fest of his over on Mepislover : http://mepislovers.org/forums/showth...994#post161994

            so in other words : whine whine, fuss fuss, it's always somebody else is at fault.

            If you expected the worst, and did nothing to prevent that worst from occuring, either by getting involved or contacting AMD directly, what you say comes off as pathetic excuses, and nothing more.

            ***

            okay. edit. After walking away from the keyboard for a while, this just came off as incomplete. I'm going to try to articulate what exactly it is about h2's stance that just completely ticks me off.

            For starters, it's the baldface stance on the status of the drivers. Okay, at one point the OpenGL drivers were horrible. AMD/ATi fixed the acceleration problems. The list of bugfixes with each driver went from one or two bugs, to five or six, to seven or eight, to ten or more bugs squashed on average.

            However, that wasn't good enough for people. Open source users cried for an open source strategy. So ATI, then AMD came up with one, releasing internal code documentation and paying for the development of an Open Licensed driver, RadeonHD.

            Again, people complained because RadeonHD was competing with X.org ATi, and X.org ATi was seeing faster development due to their adoption of AMD tools, while RadeonHD went after the less AMD dependent reverse-engineering method. So the RadeonHD devs finally started using AtomBIOS.

            That still wasn't good enough. People wanted parts of Fglrx opened up, so AMD said yes. Then people wanted the installer scripts opened up, so AMD said yes.

            And now that AMD has pretty much answered every single question, rewritten the drivers from scratch, and damn near hand catered to every single demand brought forward from the Open-Source communities, it's still not enough. After distribution maintainers railed against AMD/ATi for lack of control over the scripts, and the inability to add more scripts for each distribution, now it's suddenly the opposite. AMD isn't doing enough internal testing. It's no longer the distribution maintainers problem. It's AMD's problem.

            That's bull****, and it ends here, and it ends now.
            Last edited by Saist; 05 March 2009, 07:21 PM.

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            • #96
              Let me add something here. About 70% of this thread is people whining about this step. It gets kind of tiring after a while to read all the negativity.

              Basically, what bridgman keeps saying here holds true. The FOSS drivers will rather soon (once the new graphics stack stabilises) reach about 60-70% performance of fglrx, which is _more than reasonable_ for something that is maintainable for a very long time. For the remaining 30-40% for your gpu you'd have to roll up your sleeves and get to work -- which is again, more than fair.

              I mean, this is becoming ridiculous. The specs are there for pretty much everything and for everyone to see. When they weren't, people whined about AMD. Now people (even if it's technically a different group of people) still whine about AMD doing the _right_ step to be able to deliver overall better performance with fglrx (even though whether it's needed anymore is questionable). All in all, can't you appreciate AMD's efforts?

              I mean, saying "my next card is nvidia" just doesn't cut it, if you work according to that logic, you might as well be using Windows.

              Comment


              • #97
                Originally posted by susikala View Post
                I mean, saying "my next card is nvidia" just doesn't cut it, if you work according to that logic, you might as well be using Windows.
                Expecting on par performance levels of the card when in another OS in not unreasonable at all. People don't purchase video cards for 70% of it's potential. People will buy and upgrade cards when there is a 20% increase in performance though.

                Comment


                • #98
                  Originally posted by Kano View Post
                  R500 is a DX10 card and they drop support for everything below a DX10.1.
                  R500 is DX9 -- DX10 started with R600.

                  AFAIK the X1xxx parts are all DX9, HD2xxx are all DX10, HD3xxx and above are all DX10.1.

                  Originally posted by Kano View Post
                  Somebody should _sue_ ATI, really thats unfair if you can not use a newer Xserver, DRM, Mesa on a specific distro. The driver is not even in a fully working state and then drop support? Thats absolutely ridiculous!
                  Again, we aren't dropping support we are shifting our support to the open source driver.

                  It would all seem more clear if we had hired open source developers today rather than starting a year ago, but we didn't want to shift support to open source until the drivers were in reasonably decent shape (which, in fairness, I think they are for 3xx-5xx GPUs).
                  Last edited by bridgman; 05 March 2009, 07:40 PM.
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                  • #99
                    Ya.

                    The most important thing in my book is stability. And the proprietary drivers for ATI never delivered that and were focused mostly on performance above all else.

                    Personally I think that stability matters. And the open source drivers can deliver that. They can, with the help of involved users, fix bugs fater, support hardware longer, and provide a high quality out-of-the-box experience for Linux.. which the proprietary ATI drivers never could.

                    So ATI/AMD should be hailed and congratulated for what they have done.

                    Let them worry about the latest and greatest and getting the last 10% of the performance that some folks need... I want decent performing, reliable, stable, and zero effort 3D acceleration; which is what the OSS drivers can deliver.

                    Don't underestimate the high quality of experience that zero effort can deliver. Seriously. Having things 'just work' is WONDERFUL and makes it much easier for everybody... from the developers to the end users.


                    When shit 'just works'... Linux is _SLICK_. It's a terrific operating system and surpasses even OS X in many ways in terms of usability. But we can't get there relying on proprietary drivers... they just can't deliver what is required.

                    Comment


                    • lol anyways this is how things are:

                      AMD is dropping support for cards where there isnt yet a valid alternative. In other words they are kindly inviting users that own such cards(example me) either to wait (that jesus comes back on earth) or simply go and buy a new cards.

                      I'm sick of all this. Everyone should.


                      I'de like to know the day my ATI card will do something it never did on Linux: WORK.
                      AMEN.

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