Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

AMD's Legacy Driver Will Not Support X Server 1.6

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #11
    Worked on a radeon 2000 GPU tonight. It's a complete waste of silicon and using it for even web browsing is not a good thing. I'm thinking with the proliferation of HD 4350 cards for 40 bucks and HD 4550 cards for 50 bucks this is a real NON ISSUE.

    Now if they are going to dump the 3200 IGPU then they need to rethink that cause it's actually useful for few things. But if you have a slot even a PCI slot you need to put something besides 1000 igpu video in the machine. They should probably consider dumping support for 2000 because shader 3.0 cards of any sort will be useless in the future.
    Last edited by Hephasteus; 05 March 2009, 10:31 PM.

    Comment


    • #12
      Hardware: ATi ~ Nvidia
      Software: Nvidia >> ATi

      Comment


      • #13
        In only 1 day AMD wants the world to know how much they suck.
        I must give them my compliments. There is also 0 reasons for not updating the legacy driver especially considering that the open source driver is FAR, and I sad FAR, from complete. NVIDIA once again beats AMD 10 times.

        And I can finally feel in a Michael's AMD article a certain disappointment.

        Comment


        • #14
          I seem to remember you asking, on this very site, for someone to kill the fglrx driver as a favour to humanity

          Other than 3D support (which a bunch of devs are working on now) where do you see the open source driver being deficient ?
          Last edited by bridgman; 06 March 2009, 12:54 AM.
          Test signature

          Comment


          • #15
            Originally posted by bridgman View Post
            I seem to remember you asking, on this very site, for someone to kill the fglrx driver as a favour to humanity
            It bothers me a bit to see articles that could be described as 'whiny', because often, being a linux user, I'm marginalized as a 'vocal minority' and someone who 'just wants everything, and for free'.. don't be afraid to save some emotion for the first post in the comment form.

            Comment


            • #16
              Originally posted by SyXbiT View Post
              great argument.

              If Linus decided to kill Linux, think of all the free testers BSD and open solaris would get!!!!

              STUPID argument
              A. They would get more testers. I am not moving to Windows anytime soon, so are most people using Linux. FreeBSD and OpenSolaris are more and more similar to Linux every day, just that neither use the Linux kernel.

              B. Linus can't kill Linux. It's open source and it's not owned by him. Which is the whole point behind "Free" software.


              Linux open source ATI drivers still support hardware going back to R200. Why? Because people are still using machines that old and put the effort into it. Once people stop using those old cards then driver support will eventually whither away.

              And sure it's going to be irritating for a lot of people. But that's the problem with closed source stuff: Once you stop making money for the owners of the software, why should they care about you? I don't see any reason why they should care about me just because I have a old R400 card laying around.

              For long-term Linux operating systems like CentOS or Debian (among others) you can continue using your closed source ATI drivers with supported pre-1.6.0 versions of Xserver for another 5 years or so. No problem. I think Redhat supports their stuff for 7 years; so that is how long CentOS is going to support it. Just because people release newer versions of Linux or X doesn't mean you have to upgrade to them any time soon.

              It's kinda funny since one of the perceived benefits of running Windows was their 'stable driver ABI' and whatnot. But it was only 'stable' and compatible with older drivers because Microsoft didn't release a new desktop OS since 2000. (XP being to 2000 what Windows 7 will be to Vista). You can take the same approach with Linux and just not upgrade. Certain distros have good policies for supporting older versions for a number of years.

              Comment


              • #17
                Originally posted by bridgman View Post
                I seem to remember you asking, on this very site, for someone to kill the fglrx driver as a favour to humanity

                Other than 3D support (which a bunch of devs are working on now) where do you see the open source driver being deficient ?
                I wonder if you are not seriouslly pissed ... First the community cries for docs and open drivers and for dropping fglrx ... Now we have quite good open drivers for r300 r400 and r500 ... and everyone cries for the hated and bashed fglrx dropping suppport for those chips. I think I would be pissed at community reaction if I were in your shoes.

                Now seriously. three AMD emplyers are still working on open drivers so why the cry for something that you people hated before (fglrx) ? Be constructive and at least cry for new features in the open drives.
                Last edited by val-gaav; 06 March 2009, 03:28 AM.

                Comment


                • #18
                  Originally posted by val-gaav View Post
                  I wonder if you are not seriouslly pissed ... First the community cries for docs and open drivers and for dropping fglrx ... Now we have quite good open drivers for r300 r400 and r500 ... and everyone cries for the hated and bashed fglrx dropping suppport for those chips. I think I would be pissed at community reaction if I were in your shoes.
                  there is always a lot of social intertia around such changes.

                  everyone cries for the hated and bashed fglrx dropping suppport for those chips
                  i don't. and i bet i'm not the only one. so don't say "everyone"

                  it's a hard decision, but i think it is good. same thing happens with windows drivers - but you can stick with older drivers for that particular windows version (if there is such).

                  similar thing happened when gentoo dropped xmms from their repository - a massive backlash from many people, who were too attached to obsoleted software that caused a lot of security issues, and headaches for distro maintainers.

                  but later, people got over it.

                  Comment


                  • #19
                    [QUOTE=Hephasteus;65404]Worked on a radeon 2000 GPU tonight. It's a complete waste of silicon and using it for even web browsing is not a good thing. I'm thinking with the proliferation of HD 4350 cards for 40 bucks and HD 4550 cards for 50 bucks this is a real NON ISSUE.{/QUOTE]

                    I've gotta wonder where you're surfing, because for me that hasn't been a problem for years. Anyway, yes you can drop 40$ into your latest desktop rig. But your laptop? On any other old computer you got standing around?

                    Basicly there's two things you want, security patches and application updates. No xserver support => no newer distributions => old software. Sure you can try to do a mix-and-match like downgrading your xserver or upgrading your applications while pinning the xserver but you're likely to run into trouble.

                    I haven't got the impression all your worries will be over if you switch to a HD 4xxx card either. How long until you need your next 40$ fix?

                    Comment


                    • #20
                      Originally posted by bridgman View Post
                      (which a bunch of devs are working on now)
                      So we exchange some devs from fglrx support to the open source radeon driver(s), correct?

                      That sounds like a good exchange.

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X