AMD Publishes AMDGPU UVD Firmware For Southern Islands

[bridgman]

If AMD doesn't sell that anymore, then why do they keep creating new marketing names for these products? E.g. Radeon 610 which is a 28 nm Southern Islands (GFX6 / first generation GCN) part, launched in Q3 2019.

I didn't think we had sold any 610's, but looks like it was used in the Dell Vostro 3590 last year, so my statement of "haven't sold any for a while" is still correct but the "while" is a few months shorter than I had previously thought.

It actually performed closer to a 620 (Lexa) than I expected:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q69GypzjQwE

[qarium]

I didn't think we had sold any 610's, but looks like it was used in the Dell Vostro 3590 last year, so my statement of "haven't sold any for a while" is still correct but the "while" is a few months shorter than I had previously thought.
It actually performed closer to a 620 (Lexa) than I expected:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q69GypzjQwE

why not can we just agree to minimum support from release to EOL 10 years....
means a HD7970 is from 2011 means you should support it to 2022...
and by support i do not mean keep old stuff until it dies... instead i mean active development like AMDGPU kernel part for GCN1.0

right now a HD7970 is at 60€ in 2022 it will be at maybe 20€ means a loss of 20€ should be ok.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

your argument that suggests they've dropped support for these older parts

I doesn't suggest anything about dropped support. Don't make things up, please.
I said "Sane customers still take vendor commitment to prolonged hardware support and promises fulfillment into account during shopping for new hardware." and this is what I mean. Because, you now, it's insane to keep buying from vendor who never delivered feature complete driver for it's past gen hardware. It's just stupid thing to do, plain and simple.

Feelings that they haven't supported these stem mostly from people like you who think they should support everything on the latest and greatest codebases

On Windows they improve performance of old parts over time, and customers like it, as you can see.
On Linux they do the same. So whatever they should support everything on latest and greatest is not the question - they already doing so anyway on both platforms.

But, pay attention here, I been talking about feature completeness. Specifically feature completeness. AMD already have poor track record in laptops market, and make own laptop parts look even worse by forcing customers to choice between gaming (DXVK) and hardware video decoding is not brightest idea. Regardless of your opinion on the matter, customers is free to decide it's wrong way of treating them and next time they will trow cash at other vendor. Thankfully, AMD fixed this now.

Ah, and you also missing the fact that some AMD GPUs (such as R9 390) was never stable on radeon kernel driver in first place, and using previously feature incomplete amdgpu on such GPU is still requirement by this day.

What you're doing is like expecting that when a car company

Car analogies is always false.

[rox77]

I just compiled drm-next (from Alex) and UVD works with verde (HD7770)! but system fail to resume if UVD was used while suspend.

[L_A_G]

I doesn't suggest anything about dropped support. Don't make things up, please.
I said "Sane customers still take vendor commitment to prolonged hardware support and promises fulfillment into account during shopping for new hardware." and this is what I mean. Because, you now, it's insane to keep buying from vendor who never delivered feature complete driver for it's past gen hardware. It's just stupid thing to do, plain and simple.

Umm... You claim that you're not talking about dropping support, yet you quote yourself talking about not supporting hardware like they should. Do you not see this?

But, pay attention here, I been talking about feature completeness. Specifically feature completeness. AMD already have poor track record in laptops market, and make own laptop parts look even worse by forcing customers to choice between gaming (DXVK) and hardware video decoding is not brightest idea. Regardless of your opinion on the matter, customers is free to decide it's wrong way of treating them and next time they will trow cash at other vendor. Thankfully, AMD fixed this now.

You're talking "feature completeness" with an API that came out a year after the last GCN2 hardware was discontinued and an application that uses it which came out two years after that. This is exactly why I compared your demands for full AMDGPU support on long since discontinued hardware is like demanding that carmakers retrofit parts made for newer models onto older models for free. You got what what you paid for back then and you haven't lost anything, but you're demanding a whole bunch more for free.

Car analogies is always false.

Umm... That's not how making an argument works. You can't just make sweeping statements like that with nothing to back it up except your own opinion. If that was true I could just say that fans of William Gibson are idiots and always wrong, so I win the argument and walk away.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Umm... You claim that you're not talking about dropping support, yet you quote yourself talking about not supporting hardware like they should. Do you not see this?

You're talking "feature completeness" with an API that came out a year after the last GCN2 hardware was discontinued and an application that uses it which came out two years after that. This is exactly why I compared your demands for full AMDGPU support on long since discontinued hardware is like demanding that carmakers retrofit parts made for newer models onto older models for free. You got what what you paid for back then and you haven't lost anything, but you're demanding a whole bunch more for free.

All people expect is at least same level of support AMD provide to Windows users. And, you know, both of Vulkan and DXVA works on GCN1 with AMD drivers for Windows. So I not sure why you insist that Linux drivers should be less feature complete than Windows drivers, as if Linux customers paid less.

Also I want to remind there is competitors and customers is always free to shop elsewhere next time. So move on from comparing AMD Linux drivers with engines to comparing it AMD Linux drivers with Intel Linux drivers, Nvidia Linux drivers and finally AMD Windows drivers. No need for making up false analogies with cars and engines, as you see.

[chithanh]

my statement of "haven't sold any for a while" is still correct but the "while" is a few months shorter than I had previously thought.

Actually, I just remembered that strange AMD "Cato" APU, which appeared around April 2019 and according to some reports, uses the same silicon as the Xbox One APU (GFX7 / 2nd gen GCN). The only product that contains Cato and that normal consumers can buy is the Chuwi AeroBox mini with A9-9820 which has first been sighted in March 2020.

So unless Chuwi based their product on something which AMD already stopped taking orders for, I would expect that AMD has very recently been selling those.

[L_A_G]

All people expect is at least same level of support AMD provide to Windows users. And, you know, both of Vulkan and DXVA works on GCN1 with AMD drivers for Windows. So I not sure why you insist that Linux drivers should be less feature complete than Windows drivers, as if Linux customers paid less.

Considering the amount of work necessary and the fact that the Linux market is something like 1% of the total PC gaming market, demanding to get the same level of support as the platform that holds over 90% of the PC gaming market is simply entitled!

Also I want to remind there is competitors and customers is always free to shop elsewhere next time. So move on from comparing AMD Linux drivers with engines to comparing it AMD Linux drivers with Intel Linux drivers, Nvidia Linux drivers and finally AMD Windows drivers. No need for making up false analogies with cars and engines, as you see.

You do know that Nvidia has a single unified driver codebase they've had for over a decade and are thus able to support their hardware much easier on loads of different platforms? To support GCN1 and GCN2 hardware on Linux AMD has to go back and write loads of code and test loads of unique code for their much newer AMDGPU drivers. All Nvidia has to do to support their own older hardware is to just not throw out pre-existing code.

This large amount of extra work to support hardware what went out of production years before the AMDGPU driver was even released is exactly why I used the car analogy. You don't seem to understand how graphics drivers work, that AMDGPU isn't the same codebase as the old fglrx and/or that AMD isn't a non-profit.

The simple truth of the matter is that the transition to the new AMDGPU codebase for cards from years before this codebase was released to the public is going to require a lot of extra work with no clear return on investment. AMD is a company, not a charity, an academic institution or other form of non-profit. You can see Intel taking a similar approach to their new ANV codebase and I'm pretty sure Nvidia would do something very similar if they moved to a new more modern codebase.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

and the fact that the Linux market is something like 1% of the total PC gaming market

Then Linux gamers simply deserve nothing - that your point? Because, you know, if we take this "1%" into account every time - any investment into Linux desktop/gaming/etc should not happen. Ever.

with no clear return on investment

Yes, as I said from the beginning - it's more PR move:

Sane customers still take vendor commitment to prolonged hardware support and promises fulfillment into account during shopping for new hardware. Remember how to long it took for AMD to shake off reputation of vendor who frequently drop GPU support?

So getting GCN1 support into good shape in open source driver is good PR and good advertisement for both of new customers who move from Nvidia to AMD and for current customers who run previous generations of AMD hardware. Both groups will see this as good move and buy/recommend new hardware by AMD with much higher probability.

My guess is that AMD managers know shit they are doing a bit, and somehow they decided return out of this PR move will cover driver improvement cost. So maybe, just maybe, AMD managers can do their job better than you can do their job? Is that possibility, in your opinion?

[L_A_G]

Then Linux gamers simply deserve nothing - that your point? Because, you know, if we take this "1%" into account every time - any investment into Linux desktop/gaming/etc should not happen. Ever.

Now that's a pretty poor straw man right there... We're not talking about cancelling investment altogether by rather extending a new graphics driver to support hardware that was discontinued years before said driver was ever released to the public.

Again, demanding AMD go over and beyond writing loads of unique code for long since discontinued hardware when you're only 1% of the PC gaming market is just plain entitled. That's the best way I can describe it all.

Yes, as I said from the beginning - it's more PR move:

Yes, a one that sucks up loads of engineer man hours that could be used to improve things for newer hardware used by many more people. All engineer time put into supporting long since discontinued hardware is time away from supporting supported hardware used by many more people.

My guess is that AMD managers know shit they are doing a bit, and somehow they decided return out of this PR move will cover driver improvement cost. So maybe, just maybe, AMD managers can do their job better than you can do their job? Is that possibility, in your opinion?

Well here you are moaning about how they should spend less time and money on supporting current hardware and more on supporting hardware that was discontinued years ago because that's somehow "a good PR move". AMD doesn't have an infinite number of engineers to work on their Linux drivers and have to prioritize what they do have. All effort put into supporting legacy devices is effort that would otherwise be spend on supporting more current hardware. It's as simple as that.

You're free to insist they should support hardware that's been out of production for years with all the latest features, but I'm still going to point out that this is inevitably done at the cost of support for more recent hardware and it's a pretty wasteful effort as it only caters to a small minority of users in what's already a very niche platform with only 1% market penetration.