AMD To Drop Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Catalyst Support

[Hirager]

I hope they can improve DPI support until then, though. Right now changing the DPI on Linux only changes the font size, and not the size of any graphical elements, even if they use SVGs for them...

KDE's Oxygen handles high DPI impressively well. I have a 135 PPI (pixels per inch) netbook. It's only problem regarding the pixel destiny is Firefox's policy of forced 96 PPI, which makes web browsing a difficult task.

[Kivada]

About moving to NVIDIA from AMD - you're comparing their OSS drivers. In that case, yes, AMD OSS drivers are in a better shape support-wise. But when comparing the binary blobs, NVIDIA has the upper hand - once again, look at Wine statistics. FGLRX can't even launch any Unreal Engine 3 games further than the menu, while NVIDIA users give those games Platinum rankings and report near perfect performance... So yes, if you want to support OSS, then sticking with AMD could be a good idea. But if you want to actually play games with the binary blob - not so much, unfortunately.

I don't care about the blob for either company and I care even less about Wine, PlayOnLinux, Crossover or Cedega compatibility.

That's not the high end gamer market, that's the enthusiast market... Because, like I said, there is no need to upgrade from HD4000s to play high end games today. Anyone who does upgrade is basically wasting their money, or already have something crazy like a 3+ monitor setup, which means that they're enthusiasts.

Try the PC only titles not the console ports like Mass Effect 3, if you max the graphics settings on titles like Metro2033, Aliens VS Predator, Hard Reset, Just Cause 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dirt 3, Crysis: Warhead, Mafia 2, Batman Arkam City, Total War: Shogun 2, STALKER: Call of Pripyat and the list goes on for Windows games that when maxed out on detail settings will barely break a 30 FPS average let alone the 60FPS the high end gamers demand on 1920x1080~2560x1600 no AA~4x AA if that on an HD4890, the guys playing these games refuse to compromise by lowering settings, hence why they are always buying the best they can get their hands on, some have 3-4 top end cards pushing a single monitor...

Sure, if you are talking only Linux titles, almost all can be played just fine on a $100-130 GPU.

[Kivada]

KDE's Oxygen handles high DPI impressively well. I have a 135 PPI (pixels per inch) netbook. It's only problem regarding the pixel destiny is Firefox's policy of forced 96 PPI, which makes web browsing a difficult task.

Block the ads, collapse their place holders and hit Ctrl+"+" to scale up the page, it scales everything, graphics, Videos, Flash etc. unlike most browsers that only increase the font size which causes the text to go places it shouldn't. It works great here at 133PPI and Firefox remembers the zoom setting for every site and automatically applies it site wide.

Also, Image Zoom is a really nice extension.

[adrenochrome]

sad news

that's really a bad news. the main problem is that there's no alternative : today it's impossible to make linux run on cards like radeon 9xxx (pre-HD) which are still technically completely capable.
Current opensource drivers dont even allow youtube videos to run smooth on this kind of gfx card
Since it's impossible to upgrade gpu in most notebooks, the linux user amount will only decrease

[Hirager]

Block the ads, collapse their place holders and hit Ctrl+"+" to scale up the page, it scales everything, graphics, Videos, Flash etc. unlike most browsers that only increase the font size which causes the text to go places it shouldn't. It works great here at 133PPI and Firefox remembers the zoom setting for every site and automatically applies it site wide.

Also, Image Zoom is a really nice extension.

Alas, I have multiple machines, in which I have to have everything synced up, together with settings and add-ons. There is no place for this kind of manipulation. Hah, I think I'll just file a bug report for this issue.

[Hirager]

that's really a bad news. the main problem is that there's no alternative : today it's impossible to make linux run on cards like radeon 9xxx (pre-HD) which are still technically completely capable.
Current opensource drivers dont even allow youtube videos to run smooth on this kind of gfx card
Since it's impossible to upgrade gpu in most notebooks, the linux user amount will only decrease

You're saying as if old drivers are specially destroyed. The problem with the drivers you mentioned was that they were written in compliance with deprecated DRI. All the current drivers are compliant with DRI2. No one wanted to port the old drivers, and maintenance cost was too big. Nothing like this will happen ever again!

[piete]

This is even worse news for us older legacy card users, since now the community attention will surely focus on these newer cards. My best power management option on linux side is still Debian Lenny, and the best power management overall, Windows XP, feels a better system each day I spend with my work laptop's Windows 7. The 15-second startup is now closer to 15 minutes, of course not being the administrator makes the life more difficult so I don't know how well I could optimise Win7, but with Vista the recent "updates" made my computers so slow that I ditched it for good and use now only XP and Lenny. Too bad Windows 2000 doesn't equal XP in the power management (not a GPU driver problem since they use the same driver), since it really seems a lightweight OS nowadays.

[DanL]

maybe the amd management (one of them do have the name bridgman) chose this faster catalyst drop because of this news: "AMD Evergreen Gallium3D Officially Does GLSL 1.30 AMD R600/R700 Gallium3D Confirms GLSL 1.30

Or maybe Bridgman has nothing to do with that kind of thing (as he's noted himself) and the decision was entirely made based on Windows side...

[allquixotic]

"(as he's noted himself)" quote? source?
in fact bridgman also vote against the AGP bus this means he really do such stuff.

From here (emphasis mine):

Sure it's a simple question, but I certainly can't give you an answer.

It seems highly unlikely, particularly since we do enable HDMI audio in the Linux Catalyst drivers, but if we were I wouldn't know about it anyways.

In response to you in the immediately previous post:

does AMD get money from Microsoft or Hollywood to cripple the HDMI audio on linux?

Simple question I'm sure you can give me a answer.

Q, before you start making crazy theories about how Bridgman has influence in the Catalyst team, please work a corporate job for a couple months. I don't care where; you could even work one in Germany and get the same feel. What's important is that you gain real-world experience of working in a large enterprise (preferably one that sells products all over the globe) and see just how much different teams are separated.

I work for a corporation, and I can tell you that there is no way in hell another team would come to me and ask me for my "vote" on some issue that is not directly part of my job description. The only information that bridgman gets about Catalyst is the same information that you or I could get -- the only difference is that he can occasionally catch someone from the Catalyst team in the hall, and ask them directly, instead of having to submit a support request and waiting a while to get an answer.

As far as Catalyst is concerned, think of bridgman as a well-informed end user. Nothing more. He is not part of their team, so he is not part of their decision-making process. End of story. This is how corporations work. All of them. All of them.

[energyman]

oh great. Q. is in full throttle stupid mode again. People, time to close this thread and just ignore it out of existance.