Radeon Driver Rewrite Only Has A Few Things Left

[Adarion]

Afaik a lot of older cards is still supported in the Catalyst driver for Windows. E.g. I found the X1250 chip still to be supported in the recent release while it is marked as legacy for fglrx.
Anyway - on long terms every user could benefit from the specs release.

[bridgman]

Afaik a lot of older cards is still supported in the Catalyst driver for Windows. E.g. I found the X1250 chip still to be supported in the recent release while it is marked as legacy for fglrx.

That makes sense; you're looking at the March release for Windows, but probably looking at an early version of the April release for Linux (the driver from Ubuntu 9.04, right ?).

The March release of the Linux Catalyst driver should support the same ASICs as the March Windows driver; we just delayed the Linux driver relative to the Windows driver so we could pick up some additional Linux-specific work, so you haven't seen the March Linux driver yet.

[Kano]

In order to make more ppl happy why don't begin with removeing ids with the may release?

[RealNC]

This rewrite looks to be an advantage for older radeon users over windows now that the fgrlx/catalysts are abadoning support for older cards; with the exception of a future one-off driver (like the r100 7.4 catalysts iirc), windows users of older ati hardware have all the more reason to shift to linux.

No, it's not. You don't need new drivers for those cards on Windows. I was using Catalyst 7.11 for my X1950XT. That was the last best driver. Everything newer was slower. I couldn't care less if support for that card stopped on Windows simply because I was not using recent drivers anyway.

[crumja]

Yeah, that's cuz windows is a fixed target. Linux drivers need to be recompiled for a moving target each kernel/xorg release.