AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[Wyatt]

I wrote that before, but again: About 80% of the time since I bought my laptop, at least one of the core features of the driver was broken. So no, I am not talking about "feature and performance parity with Windows", I am talking about OpenGL at a reasonable speed, Video Overlay and TV-Out. But instead of making these features work and stable, they spend their time to squeak another half FPS out of the driver to show of to the gamer boys.

Noisy wheel gets the grease; I really don't see anyone else being nearly so vocal about this and a single voice is...well, pitifully small next to the millions of dollars made off of other people. Of course, it worked just fine for me from the 2.6.12 to the 2.6.25 kernel (at which point ACPI stuff forced my hand and I transitioned to a more recent kernel and the open driver that, wonder of wonders, performs just fine). I suspect that for most users of it, this is also the case. Maybe they "weren't using the full potential of their hardware" or whatever, but the "works for me" is a valid bug-closer.

Really, you want a driver that "just works?" Great! I have an ugly white plastic and brushed aluminum thing I'd be willing to sell you for an exorbitant price!

[Stormking]

I really don't see anyone else being nearly so vocal about this and a single voice is...well, pitifully small next to the millions of dollars made off of other people.

I know. But is this really a reason to be quiet? I don't think so. Even if I was the only one who was ripped off by ATI in this way, I would still be ripped off.

[rafi]

I'm curious. I have a x1600 mobility and so I won't be able to use catalyst with jaunty. Is there something like powerstate in the driver radeon or radeonHD?

[Kano]

@bridgeman

You are right that R500 is not DX10 but DX9. But lots or current systems out there use it. You buy something new that you can not use with a new X or kernel (at least when 9-3 is _really_ the last driver). The OSS driver is enough to run compiz, wow, everybody is applauding.

You can not run any game right now that needs GLSL (I do not talk about optional support like for many open source games) - not even my favorite tank game Zero Ballistics ( http://zeroballistics.com/ ) would run then. Do you have got a realistic timeframe when this will be working?

Nv dropped support for binary drivers too, thats correct but not in the same way as ATI does. Support for ATI DX8 cards was dropped before the OSS driver was even capable of using TV Out.

If you have been able to play at least some games then you play now only really old ones with OSS, why don't you drop 3d support at all then, then you know that you have to boot Win and don't lose time to test if it would run.

Of course many Linux users would prefer to use OSS drivers, but please feature complete, not half way at max. A little performance loss would be ok, but if the apps (example: gl2benchmark) / games do not run at all? ATI can drop support when the OSS driver is _really_ ready not when you say in the future all will be better.

I can always say the future will be better. At some point the raw cpu power will be enough to use software only rendering (anybody liking to play Crysis with 5fps on i7?). But the time is now and the fglrx driver is not even working correctly in all usage cases. X ABI changes or kernel changes will require new legacy drivers, Nv does provides those needed for most cards (71.xx is the bad example for newer X support).

Do you really think that 9-3 will be so good that it does fix all issues which have been there for a long time? I know how ATI bugs are handled, they are carried for years and it is more likely that new bugs will be there than a bug is fixed.

[chrisr]

Have you tried scrolling in Firefox?

I think the radeon driver (xf86-video-ati) already has tear-free support for 5xx-family parts.

Take a large page, like this talkback. Use the scroll-wheel on your mouse to scroll the page up and down quickly. I would not call that a "tear-free" experience with my Radeon 9550. (At least it's not slow, though.)

[bridgman]

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.

Addressing things like 2D accel tearing in the driver is really only a workaround, though, until the overall X stack gets improved. Sync-to-vblank needs to happen in the compositor, with double- or triple-buffering so that the app can draw without being slowed down. AFAIK Compiz doesn't work that way today, not sure about other compositors.

[Adarion]

Oh. Well. Or not so well.

It's kinda sad to see the X1250 IGP listed as "legacy" already. Humm. I mean there are the free drivers which is a good thing to catch up all the people with older cards that are dropping off their chairs being presented that message.
But still the free drivers lack a lot of functionality and also don't support every card.
I mean I'd rather see the fglrx living some time longer and implementing fixes etc. and supporting newer Kernels / xorg than just having nothing to work with and being damned to be stuck with a certain version of kernel and X.
Maybe ATI should concentrate on bringing fewer models to the market but rather keeping up with driver lifetime and quality. All those different HW makes absolutely no sense when it is not correctly/ not at all supported by the SW side.

I'm glad I don't have to fear for my Radeon HD 3870 but I'm still kinda scared.

But to all those writing that they'll buy nv instead: Huh, do you think it's any different with Nvidia? And nv doesn't even support free drivers!
My old Geforce2 and 3 are legacy and nearly not supported anymore for years now. At least there are specs for the ATI-AMD ones so it's possible to do something about it at all.

[deanjo]

My old Geforce2 and 3 are legacy and nearly not supported anymore for years now. At least there are specs for the ATI-AMD ones so it's possible to do something about it at all.

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

[bridgman]

But still the free drivers lack a lot of functionality and also don't support every card.

The only contentions thing here is that we are planning to maintain legacy support with the open drivers rather than with fglrx, since we feel that the open drivers are more likely to make for happy consumer users.

Other than the level of OpenGL support (which is being worked on now), and tvout (which deanjo mentioned yesterday), are there other areas where you see the open drivers missing functionality relative to fglrx.

If you see a card or GPU that isn`t supported let us know -- we don`t always know about every card on the market.

[smlbstcbr]

Before leaving behind support for those cards, can you please update what Xorg.conf options are fully/partially/not supported by the binary driver? It's kind of a dark science to write a decent xorg.conf for an Ati Radeon card.