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

[peppepz]

And people keep asking...

...why we should want open source drivers.

[evolution]

Great!

Congratulations AMD/ATI, now my HD4650AGP is going to be left behind without any kind of 2D UVD/vaapi acceleration, slow (as hell) 3D performance (as mesa is still too much CPU-bound and that card is on a [email protected]), and poor power management. As some people already said in this thread, laptop HD2xxx/4xxx users will also love the (lacking of) power management features in FOSS AMD drivers... Fortunately I'll freeze xorg to 1.11 and Catalyst to 11.4, so I'll be able to use my HD4650AGP for a while...

I agree that FOSS is the future of SW development and the right way to go, unfortunately, it should be at a minimum that people can use it without sacrificing productivity. In my case, that is having proper 2D UVD/video acceleration, power management and finally 3D acceleration.

I already switched to the green side (nVidia) in laptops. Maybe it's also time to switch to the green side on desktops too and start recommend nVidia instead of ATI/AMD to my friends/colleagues...

From a 15y ATI user,
Cheers

[Dukenukemx]

Just when linux gaming was starting to look interesting, AMD pulls this crap. Way to go idiots.

[drag]

I wouldn't hold my breath for UVD.

However implementing VDPAU acceleration via shaders may be a actually useful alternative.

As long as I get smooth playback with 1080p I don't give a crap how the low-level details work out.

[drag]

Just when linux gaming was starting to look interesting, AMD pulls this crap. Way to go idiots.

Blah blah blah.

Then you'll switch to Nvidia and Nvidia will pull the same bullshit on you with their drivers.

This is _one_ of the reasons why OSS drivers are the way to go.

[Kano]

Even without help of nvidia there is nouveau, most likely when nvidia drops support for a current cpu in a few years it will work just fine.

[remjg]

I think support for AGP cards was dropped by the proprietary driver long time ago, but maybe I am wrong.

I didn't know this, I will try it this week-end anyway.

Gnome shell works very good with the free Radeon driver.

I know ! It's shame that the proprietary driver doesn't (didn't ?) ! The open source driver is still too slow though...

[Tiger_Coder]

WTF?

I just purchase A motherboard with Amd 8 series chip-set with hd4250 IGP. It was not a gaming machine but with fglrx in Ubuntu , old games like DOOM 3 or UT2004 or DirectX8/9 games with wine works just fine . In a 3rd world country, I lived and being a student myself, its hard to buy newer gpu very often(and even if I do, I will surely bye a nvidia one, they still support my old machine's geforce 6200 agp card). Also even I left gaming all, I was learning OpenCL. I don't know what is the status with OSS drivers with OpenCL.

[Saist]

Not really sure why it would be controversial. The last 4x00 series card released was over 3 years ago in February 2009. Anybody who was running these for OpenGL performance reasons has probably upgraded by now.

As far as driver support goes, the Open-Source driver support is pretty solid. I've been running on a Radeon 4650 GPU on the X.org driver for several months now and really haven't missed anything that would be in Catalyst. Sure, I can't really run Unigine on the driver, but, come on, again, if I was any sort of gamer, I wouldn't be using cards from 3 years ago that lacked OpenGL 4.x support.

[Hirager]

How about some crowd funding to accelerate development of the free driver? Even I with my little reserves would chip in something.