Getting 9.3 Legacy to work on newest release

[Ex-Cyber]

Put your wide beams on and don't be so narrow.

Right back at you, buddy. I've been using both radeon and fglrx on and off for years, and the idea that either one is somehow an unqualified improvement over the other is almost hilariously wrong.

[damentz]

Right back at you, buddy. I've been using both radeon and fglrx on and off for years, and the idea that either one is somehow an unqualified improvement over the other is almost hilariously wrong.

I also think it's so hilariously wrong of me to think the open source drivers are superior to the legacy fglrx drivers for < R500! What was I thinking?

Hey, I'll sell you a very powerful Radeon 1950 XTX with 512mb of video ram. Can you figure out how to play Savage 2, Doom 3, or Heroes of Newerth with this beast of a card in a modern distribution like Ubuntu 9.10 or Fedora 12?

Please send me a note if you can! I enabled all the settings in the games the card was advertised to support to get the best graphical experience guaranteed by the price of the card and it all failed!

Point of the story, Kano is right. I feel embarrassed telling one of my friends with the 1950 xtx that ati supports his card - he actually just got fed up and upgraded his PC with the Geforce GTX 295. At least this investment won't go up in flames in the future for Windows and Linux.

[bridgman]

With respect, I don't believe we have ever advertised that specific games were supported under Linux, so any comments about "the games the card was advertised to support" are misleading in the sense that any "advertisements" would have been for Windows not Linux.

That said, it *is* true that the open source drivers are not yet at the point where they can satisfy users who purchased high end 4xx or 5xx cards specifically for Linux gaming. We said back in May that 3D gaming would be the last part of the open source stack to "catch up" and recommended that users stay with the distro they had until the 3D stack could provide the higher level of GL functionality the games you mentioned require.

Work is underway on adding GLSL support for both 3xx-5xx and 6xx-7xx stacks, although (surprisingly, at least for me) the 6xx/7xx support hit the first milestones before the corresponding functionality on 3xx-5xx. I was expecting 3xx-5xx GLSL to hit before 6xx-7xx. We may have to shuffle some tasks around to keep the two families moving along at roughly the same rate.

A critical pre-requisite for GL 2.x (GEM/TTM) seems to be stabilizing nicely, and looks like it is going to be picked up by the next round of distro releases, mostly coming out in spring 2010. I expect that GLSL and the other extensions required to run the GL2 games you mentioned will be in place by then as well, although until we see the games running on open source drivers there's always going to be a bit of uncertainty re: exactly how much functionality will be required.

In the interest of completeness I should mention that a lot of 3D games *are* running on the 3D drivers today, and that it's primarily the ones requiring GLSL support or other GL 2.x extensions which require further work.

For what it's worth, I don't think anyone is saying that the open source drivers are superior to fglrx in every respect, but obviously some folks are saying that the open source driver does a better job of meeting their specific needs and priorities, which is a fair statement to make. You just can't assume that everyone has the same needs and priorities, as you have clearly indicated.

[damentz]

Thank you bridgeman, my pet peeve were the people asserting that the open source drivers were equivalent or better than the legacy fglrx driver without the a disclaimer regarding the supported OpenGL extensions, today, in current distributions, and not what was being worked on now in upstream svn or git.

Sorry if I sounded arrogant and / or ignorant in my previous response!

[adamk]

Work is underway on adding GLSL support for both 3xx-5xx and 6xx-7xx stacks, although (surprisingly, at least for me) the 6xx/7xx support hit the first milestones before the corresponding functionality on 3xx-5xx. I was expecting 3xx-5xx GLSL to hit before 6xx-7xx. We may have to shuffle some tasks around to keep the two families moving along at roughly the same rate.

Please keep us in the loop on the shuffling of those tasks and the progress of GLSL on r3xx-r5xx.

[piete]

Hey, I'll sell you a very powerful Radeon 1950 XTX with 512mb of video ram. Can you figure out how to play Savage 2, Doom 3, or Heroes of Newerth with this beast of a card in a modern distribution like Ubuntu 9.10 or Fedora 12?

Please send me a note if you can! I enabled all the settings in the games the card was advertised to support to get the best graphical experience guaranteed by the price of the card and it all failed!

Hi! My humble two cents:
1. Debian
2. Lenny

It may not be "cutting edge" but for my slow internet connection the unnecessity to download updates every day is very much welcome! Also, there is not much I can't find in the repositories. And if something is missing, I'm sure it would not be impossible to compile the missing programs from source.

I haven't bothered to check which fglrx version it has (I'm also a bit confused between the "8.xxx" and "9.x" numbering of the versions) but I'm happy that the power management works on my Mobility X1600 on my HP NC8430 laptop, and I also get a respectable framerate for Sauerbraten (which wasn't the case testing the same game on radeon driver).

I spent enough time playing with Arch Linux and sidux, but continuous updating with a slow internet connection and the increased heating of the GPU made me think another time. I'm sure Debian gets a lot of respect but it may also be overlooked by many due not being "cutting edge", that is, the stable version.

[Kano]

Well maybe the best distro to try is my own one It allows you still to install 2.6.28 kernel to get rid of dmesg errors and it heavly updated against pure Debian lenny. Use irc://irc.freenode.net/#kanotix and ask if you like to try.

[monraaf]

do not Blame the opensource driver only because you do not wana spend 20? for an supportet cart!

+1

For crying out loud stimulate the economy and buy some new hardware. The minute you bought your card you should have known that sooner or later ATI/AMD was going to drop support for it. I can't believe that AMD is actually considering shifting resources to the R300 driver. AFAIK GLSL for R600 is far from complete and there isn't even 3D support for R800 yet, but it looks likes the whiners who refuse to upgrade their hardware got their way . You guys are holding back progress on the Linux desktop.

[adamk]

+1

For crying out loud stimulate the economy and buy some new hardware. The minute you bought your card you should have known that sooner or later ATI/AMD was going to drop support for it. I can't believe that AMD is actually considering shifting resources to the R300 driver. AFAIK GLSL for R600 is far from complete and there isn't even 3D support for R800 yet, but it looks likes the whiners who refuse to upgrade their hardware got their way . You guys are holding back progress on the Linux desktop.

Sounds like you're doing the whining here. I just think it makes more sense to focus resources on developing 3D drivers for hardware where this is no longer an alternative in the form of an up-to-date binary driver.

Adam

[monraaf]

Sounds like you're doing the whining here.

Yeah, I took a page out of their playbook Apparently you can actually influence AMD with whining, at least it worked for them.

I just think it makes more sense to focus resources on developing 3D drivers for hardware where this is no longer an alternative in the form of an up-to-date binary driver.

I don't expect a hardware company to support > 3 year old cards, that's like a lifetime in the area that ATI/AMD is operative in, they should leave it to the community and not support it at the expense of support for this generation's cards. And no fglrx doesn't cut it.