ATI dropping support for <R600 - wtf!?

[Svartalf]

P4 == DDR1. Add $20 for 2GB of memory and you get a whole new system ($116, or the price of the AGP 3850).

AGP parts are not a good buy at this day and time.

In this day and age, unless you're just simply trying to recycle a machine, it's just better if you go get a cheap Core-Duo or Phenom system upgrade for a couple of hundred and get you a new PCI-E GPU card. AGP parts will not perform nicely for you. I'm using AGP because I'm nursing along an Athlon64 Solo2 motherboard for 64-bit and AGP verification support...

[deanjo]

In a word, NO. glxgears is so far removed from a benchmark it's tragic. I believe the people associated with 3D drivers on Linux have been saying that it wasn't a very good benchmark for performance since I kind of quit maintaining the Utah-GLX source tree years ago.

In fact IIRC it even originally had to have a switch that was something like

glxgears  --I-acknowledge-that-this-is-not-a-benchmark

before it even ran.

[Mr_Ed]

I guess I'll be the first to suggest you at least think about upgrading to PCIE if your power supply has enough 12v output (older systems needed lots of +5V, newer systems need lots of +12V). You could start with something like a 780-based mobo and still have higher performance than your 9600, although not a *lot* faster.

Bridgeman, this confuses me. I thought the issue here was my slow and old videocard and the lack of ATI's driver support for it.

But now you say that it also leis on the fact that I am not using PCIE?

Must I conclude now that what you actually are saying that the AGP bus speed is insufficient?

Elaborate please.

Regards,

E.

[Zhick]

Bridgeman, this confuses me. I thought the issue here was my slow and old videocard and the lack of ATI's driver support for it.

But now you say that it also leis on the fact that I am not using PCIE?

Must I conclude now that what you actually are saying that the AGP bus speed is insufficient?.

No, he just suggests you that if you want to do an upgrade, you realy shouldn't upgrade to an agp-card because they're often problematic (afaik with both fglrx and radeon(hd)). And as others have pointed out, the price difference is so big you could get the same PCI-E card with a new MoBo at almost the same price-tag as the AGP-card,

[Saist]

P4 == DDR1. Add $20 for 2GB of memory and you get a whole new system ($116, or the price of the AGP 3850).

Um. Okay, your memory was a bit better. I forgot that Socket 478 was DDR. DDR2 came with 775.

[Saist]

Bridgeman, this confuses me. I thought the issue here was my slow and old videocard and the lack of ATI's driver support for it.

But now you say that it also leis on the fact that I am not using PCIE?

Must I conclude now that what you actually are saying that the AGP bus speed is insufficient?

Elaborate please.

Regards,

E.

You kind of missed the point. AGP is actually "fast" enough for most graphics operations.

But as I already outlined, you are going to pay as much for an AGP card that IS supported, if not more, than it would cost to upgrade major components of your system to something that has greater performance with lower heat output.

[bridgman]

Yeah, AGP is just a general problem area, more in terms of reliability than speed (although they are related). Some systems are rock solid, others not so much. I think the main problems is that the signal margins in the spec are too small to handle the noise levels found on a typical motherboard, so depending on which components you mix & match you can get hangs which the driver can't always recover from. Slowing down the bus speed often helps but not always.

The PCIE bus is a lot more reliable, and the specs are tight enough that you can mix & match components without worrying how well they will work together.

That said, there is so much good work happening with the open source drivers right now that I expect you could continue using the current card for quite a while longer if you wanted. It sounds like AGP is not causing you any trouble right now; we're really just saying that if you *are* going to upgrade there are better ways to spend the money than a new AGP card.

[Mr_Ed]

Yeah, AGP is just a general problem area, more in terms of reliability than speed (although they are related). Some systems are rock solid, others not so much. I think the main problems is that the signal margins in the spec are too small to handle the noise levels found on a typical motherboard, so depending on which components you mix & match you can get hangs which the driver can't always recover from. Slowing down the bus speed often helps but not always.

The PCIE bus is a lot more reliable, and the specs are tight enough that you can mix & match components without worrying how well they will work together.

That said, there is so much good work happening with the open source drivers right now that I expect you could continue using the current card for quite a while longer if you wanted. It sounds like AGP is not causing you any trouble right now; we're really just saying that if you *are* going to upgrade there are better ways to spend the money than a new AGP card.

Well, I just went back to the radeon driver:

Google-Earth doesnt work with the open source driver.

When DPMS mode is enabled and the screen goes to sleep it will not wake up from it anymore.

Pretty much everything else I do with this driver is at least 50% slower then with the fglrx driver.

i.e. Watching a video on discovery it hicks like hell.

And it is by far not as stable as the fglrx driver.

Sorry for my whining about it.

Oh, and you all say that it is much cheaper buying a pci mobo but you all forget the new cpu and power-supply that I will be forced to buy too. From what I read about it, PCI cards need a lot more power. I am defenitely not going to stick my old P4 CPU on a brand new mobo, that's for sure. If I would have to buy a new mobo I'd probably would go for at least a dual core or maybe a quad core cpu.

I.o.w. I think I'd be better off buying a whole new pc.

[bridgman]

Oh, and you all say that it is much cheaper buying a pci mobo but you all forget the new cpu and power-supply that I will be forced to buy too. From what I read about it, PCI cards need a lot more power. I am defenitely not going to stick my old P4 CPU on a brand new mobo, that's for sure. If I would have to buy a new mobo I'd probably would go for at least a dual core or maybe a quad core cpu.

I.o.w. I think I'd be better off buying a whole new pc.

We didn't forget about CPUs; it's just that a basic dual-core CPU is real cheap these days and is still faster than your P4.

I don't think PCIE cards draw more power (a bit less if anything), it's that over the years systems have shifted from using lots of 5V power to using lots of 12V power, so depending on the age of your PC you *might* need to upgrade the P/S (that was the qualifier in my initial post).

[bridgman]

I feel like I need to repeat something here for everyone.

We are not going to be driving to your house and taking away the fglrx driver you already have, and we are not saying that the open source driver is equal to fglrx in the 3D area for the 3xx-5xx chips (although most other parts of the driver area equal or better for typical consumer usage).

What we *are* saying is that IN THE FUTURE (ie starting a couple of months from now) we think that the open source drivers will be a good solution. If we spent the efforts on supporting legacy fglrx updates rather than open source development the first "quarterly update" would be five or six months from now, and by that time if you could choose between fglrx and the open drivers I think nearly all of you would pick the open drivers.