AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[oyvind]

Thank You ATI (and some AMD)

Thank You for all the years of crap support for my mobile and unreplaceable graphics card in an otherwise very OK laptop. It is good to hear that it is finally being dropped, that will be better for all. Now I am suddenly out of options, and that's just fine and dandy.

1. fglrx is no more, since support will cease completely.
2. radeon has 2D corruption issues and 3D is shabby in comparison to fglrx
3. radeonhd has very slow 3D

Reason for bitterness: It has never ever really worked f***ing well ever since I bought this stupid bloody laptop. Always some issue (often of the show-stopping kind), and always some headache.

--
Sincerely,
ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 <-- What a joke.

[tball]

We're still hoping to have rough parity with 5xx by the end of April. We have glxgears running in house -- it still has some problems but I think we know the cause for each of the problems. Richard and Cooper are working on texture support now.

I like what I hear. Then we just need powermanagement, and opensource drivers will be running on my laptop :-)

[bridgman]

[*] fglrx is no more, since support will cease completely.[*] radeon has 2D corruption issues and 3D is shabby in comparison to fglrx[*] radeonhd has very slow 3D

The radeon and radeonhd drivers use the same 3D stack, so 3D performance and features should be the same - if they're not please start a new thread and let's try to get that addressed.

There is a lot of work happening on 3xx-5xx open source 3D now -- MostAwesomeDude's Gallium3D work, airlied's radeon-rewrite effort to consolidate all the recent work (by airlied, glisse, nha and others) on memory management and command submission etc..

[gentoofu]

Yay, go MAD .


I wonder if Arch Linux dropping support for Catalyst was a good idea. If releases will assumed to be faster by dropping legacy support, they should probably give it another chance maintaining it for cards >r500 (assuming that the drivers will get better).

But with this move, I'm glad xf86-video-ati will potentially have bigger user-base.

[GreatWalrus]

Great.... So is AMD/ATI going to do this again in the future? Are we going to be forced to upgrade our cards every 1.5-2 years in order to get the [current] benefits of the Catalyst driver? Really, the HD 2000's were released in 2007, that is not long ago at all. Not to mention, most who buy pre-built PC's or laptops usually get cards from many months or years before. For example, I bought my Dell laptop in May 2007, and they gave me a radeon xpress 1150 which was released in May 2006! On the other hand, I will be building my next computer and will then have more of a decision on how recent my card will be.

I don't currently use the ATI Catalyst driver and this card isn't so great enough that I would use it for gaming, so I will just stick to the xf86 ati driver. Of course, I don't know if I could even use Compiz again without fglrx. But as for the next card I will purchase, well, it depends on Nvidia's response to this news. Will they drop support for 'old' hardware? If not, I might consider changing my wish list.

[oyvind]

The radeon and radeonhd drivers use the same 3D stack, so 3D performance and features should be the same - if they're not please start a new thread and let's try to get that addressed.

There is a lot of work happening on 3xx-5xx open source 3D now -- MostAwesomeDude's Gallium3D work, airlied's radeon-rewrite effort to consolidate all the recent work (by airlied, glisse, nha and others) on memory management and command submission etc..

I gave the wrong impression about my opinions of the open source alternatives in my rant-post, I can see that. Let me just clarify, I really do appreciate the hard work that is being done there.

However, the new technologies are still some time away, and that leaves a gaping hole in the current situation, now that fglrx-support is gone in the near future. Add to that the fact that I've always had problems with this card, and now I'll just have to trade fglrx problems with radeon or radeonhd-problems instead. Considering that the latest Catalyst-releases have worked reasonably well, that means worse problems and not too great 3D performance (I consider corruption bugs truly showstopping). And by the time the issues are resolved, I have probably moved on hardware-wise. Just leaves some frustration. I once actually had a hope of an OK working Linux driver that performs well and doesn't have glaring bugs that always pops up to say hello, before the laptop becomes obsolete.

[bridgman]

Both ATI/AMD and NVidia drop support for old hardware -- it just happens to be our turn. There's probably someone at NVidia reading this and thinking "whew, now we can drop some old GPUs"

This case was a bit different from the norm because the 3xx-5xx architecture worked well for so many years, from 2002 through 2006, so in many cases the same driver code that supported 7 year old products also supported relatively recent products as well.

Compiz should run fine with the open source drivers on X1xxx and lower parts today, although there wasn't much success with the IGP (radeon express) parts until Alex was able to dig around in some of our internal documentation to figure out how some of the blocks should be programmed.

[Stormking]

Thank you ATI, for finally making clear that you are just a bunch of %$?%$?&! Thank you for failing to deliver a decent driver for five years, now. Thank you for showing what kind of support your customers can expect in the future.

Thank you for nothing but hours and hours of trying to get you piece of %$?/& working.

Don't worry, I will not bother you, again. Because I will never need a driver from you, again.

[lykowdk]

What is this saying???

To the customer, this is a good move, permitting you are an owner of a Radeon HD 2000 graphics card or later (or an RS690/RS740 IGP, but the RS780 will remain supported).

Maybe it's because I went to public school.. What exactly is this line from the article saying?? Will the RS690 IGP still be supported or not? If not, how is it a good move for owners of a RS690 IGP?

Thanks

[Nicolas]

[rant]
Thanks ATI.

Waiting since 2005 for a decent driver for my Mobility X700, and when you seem to be near to make basic acceleration to work without glitches, you drop support.

Your driver development strategy is really poor. I bet if I install my old Geforce4 Ti4400 and download the latest nVidia drivers it will work, and it's way older then my Mobility X700.

As a matter in fact, you say that nVidia also drops support on old hardware, but the difference is that even when using old drivers, they WORK. You can watch videos, use Compiz and do whatever you need to do.

You still have problems to play videos. Is not like I'm asking to be able to play FarCry2 using Wine while watching 1080p content. We want the basics to work.

Seriously... What's wrong with the decision makers on ATI?
[/rant]