Radeon Driver Rewrite Only Has A Few Things Left

[crumja]

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

[Kano]

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

[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.

[hmmm]

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.

[bridgman]

Yes. The drivers usually bring up the name of the consumer equivalent, which is X1600 or RV530, so your GPU is in the 5xx family. The rv530 designation describes the chip die, while M56 or V5200 describes a combination of die, tested clock speeds, memory configuration etc...

[hirolau]

The radeon-rewrite effort is for r1xx-r5xx, but we're going to be building on it for 6xx-7xx as well.

I have a Radeon Mobility FireGL v5200. And it say it is an M56 not rxxx. Is M56 the same as RV530?

[dungeon]

Woohoo! This is the best news i read at phoronix recently, after AMD specs releases. Thank you Michael for news and thank you Dave for doing this!

[FunkyRider]

To normal users:

Stick with nvidia binary driver for another year, and look back afterward to decide whether to switch to open source stack or not.

I change my graphics card in a 3-6 month pace so I will enjoy my nvidia 3D experience while keeps an eye on oss side. Just sold my beloved HD 4850 because I can't do any useful OGL work under Linux because the driver is too broken... I can't even create a workable x pixmap, render to it and write it to disk. The program I wrote immediately works after I switched to nvidia stack. Well, what can I say... better is better

Also the tear-free (v-synced) compiz desktop is such a joy to use...