AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[TheK]

Well, if I see, how far the R200-driver is *still* (8 years after the hardware was released and about 5 years after the support was dropped from fglrx) behind the possibilities (disabled page flip, no tool for forced FSAA/AF), I wonder, if the freee drivers will really ever catch up, or if they'll also stay in a "at least you get good 2D and glxgears works to say it's '3D capable'. Even though, I still bought an ATI card, because in can buy a new one after 3 years onfy from the saved power bill over an comparable nVidia...

[b15hop]

Thek:
This is the gripe I have with owning any decent hardware on Linux. I've decided to go back to nvidia for this reason, until I see major changes with open source or closed source drivers in linux. The technology moves so fast that drivers can't be written fast enough. People are more likely to buy new hardware than wait around for something to happen.

[Michael]

Well, if I see, how far the R200-driver is *still* (8 years after the hardware was released and about 5 years after the support was dropped from fglrx)

Five years since R200 was dropped from fglrx? No.. It's been less than three years.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=7375

[dungeon]

And even nearly less then 5 years when last r200 chip (9250) was introduced to public.

[TheK]

The Radeon 9250 was released in 2001 and it's support officially dropped in 2006; even though it stopped working one year earlier. And the free driver stayed as slow, as it was those days. Also you still can't use FSAA on those cards, as long as it's not triggered by the app itself, because there's no config tool or even an xorg.conf-option for this.

[dungeon]

Not correct. R200 (8500) was introduced in 2001, but rV280 (9250) was introduced in mid 2004 just like rV350 (9550), after all others R300 based AGP chips minus rV370 (X1050) and nearly in same time with first R420 (X800). For comparation, R300 chip was introduced in 2002 on 9500/9700, but latest is rV370 (X1050) which was introduced in early 2007 and also after all others from R4xx series.

AA is deadly slow on rV280 so i don't miss them, but AF is there and you can adjust them with 'driconf'.

For slowness on Mesa/DRI side from that time (2006) when R200 fglrx support was dropped and today i can agree. So, performance is equal if you compare opensource Mesa/DRI drivers from that time, somewhere it loses performance like in ppracer(mesa-7.0.2>=), but it has mainly less bugs. Just two flaws/bugs is worth to mention, texture artifact on mirrors in Doom3 based games and one main and annoying performance in_all_games_issue "slowing down when open the door" which is i think because of wrong texture loading, and don't know if it is a driver issue or core Mesa bug (maybe specs will be good to see if problem is with chip), but i don't see any devs interested which was/will tend to improve these.

Forgot to mention that ppracer slowness is not because of DRI r200 driver, it is core Mesa thing, introduced with this commit:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=e279a0a076b7a3c8d60138c19870784c260c9d67

just like recent slowness people experianced with intel driver, but you can see that is not stright the DRI driver problem.

And one more bug (if someone care) which stayed for very long time: If you tried to boost performance with enabled hyperz in driconf, you can see light perforation through walls, never in static scenes, but allways when he/you move.

[Ex-Cyber]

The Radeon 9250 was released in 2001 and it's support officially dropped in 2006

Are you sure you're not thinking of the Radeon 8500? ISTR that it was still new when I built my previous box in late 2001.

[TheK]

Oh, ok - got the wrong line; the 9250 was very late in the R200-Circle...

@dungeon: have you tried to enable page flip? It's still (after ages) called "unstable", but improved things a lot for me. With work now comping up for R400/500, I hope this will finally be fixed.

[dungeon]

I tried to enable it, but not see any performance gain, so i must ask where did you see this option help you?

[MostAwesomeDude]

AA is a tricky beast. It requires a lot of setup, and in a lot of cases also a memory manager. FSAA is also not possible without a compositing manager that uses a rendering scheme with AA capabilities; at this time I think that the only such app is compiz, although kwin4 might have it as well.