Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

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

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #81
    I think I agree with some of the critic earlier in the thread: A part of the problem is too on the FLOSS side, there is no part of the API that will remain stable for several years of updates, while on Windows we know for a fact that a service pack won't break it, the only thing that annoys legacy hardware is whenever there is a new OS out. As somebody said, Debian Stable and Ubuntus "longer LTS" will last quite a few years anyhow, so from a standpoint where security updates is a concern its not a problem. Its only a problem due how the Linux infrastructure is built, its built on the idea of rapid development of the entire ecosystem, which can lead to backporting issues.
    While, its also correct to blame the blob droppers for their inflexibility, especially because of the way its hooked into the rest of the system, which do mean that something that breaks on every single component update is just a symptom over how exactly its hooked into the rest of the kernel and major "infrastructure". But a more elegant hook would likely break each half a year-year instead of on each update, which also means we have a blob hostile environment in the long run. Which is a good thing, if we only have had the markeding leverage to get manifacturers to assimilate.
    And for those of you who say "Nvidia will treat us better", you know what, does your precious randr work yet? The real problem is that as consumers, we don't really have a choice at the moment, its between broken and not working. For those of us who have such hardware, we will be stuck with Ubuntu or Debian, and we can't run Gentoo or Archlinux on the fresh and bleeding edge. There is not really any "premium linux manufacturer" either, it would not surprise me if even the Raspberry Pi will suffer extreme problems with this at a certain point in the future.

    "The solution" we are still looking for is that a random manufacturer copies Apple, but use a popular distro instead, and once it get enough marked leverage it can negotiate itself with one of the lesser known graphic manufacturers and get a deal that enables us to get a stable FLOSS brand for what is today a quite proprietary piece of hardware. This will at the least enable us to "fall back" to that brands products whenever something like this happens, presenting us with hardware we actually can acquire for our own greed and future planning.


    Originally posted by RealNC View Post
    Something that works.
    HEAR HEAR!

    Comment


    • #82
      Originally posted by GreatEmerald View Post
      4890 was out in April 2009, so I'm not sure where you're looking for this info...

      As for performance - see, the thing is, at least on the Windows side, the 4890 is so powerful that it doesn't need any upgrades to play the latest games. I only have very occasional slowdown in the absolute latest games, and that is because of my CPU, not the GPU! As for gaming on Linux, well, in this case it all comes down to the drivers, and not the card itself. Upgrading to the absolute latest would probably even decrease the performance at this point...
      You may have missed the memo that by 2013 the market is supposed to be flooded by 15~21" LCDs at 3840x2160. You're HD4890 can't even produce a 2D desktop at that resolution. Intel Ivy Bridge will support an output of 4096x4096 and the AMD HD6000 series already supports 16000x16000. They won't run Unigine Heaven at frames per second though...

      Comment


      • #83
        @Kivada

        You are right, the raw speed of Intel HD 3000 is not optimal, but Intel HD 4000 is a nice step in the right direction. Some boards allow even to oc the Intel IGP, so you can get about 10% more speed, that's not much, but AMD APUs are not so much faster anymore. Intel will use the HD core for Atom chips next year, so those chips will have got nice Linux support out of the box. I agree with you that this does not help much for older Atoms, also GMA 500/600 are pretty bad on Linux. But Intel definitely has much more developers working on OSS Linux drivers than AMD so you can expect much better support in the future. Initial IVB support was done basically several month before launch, maybe a coincidence that those chips have been delayed at least 3 month because of the buggy SNB chipsets last year (and the dual cores are still delayed most likely due to production issues). But did you ever see prelaunch AMD OSS drivers? AMD is so stupid with their PCI ID whitelist approach that even binary drivers which can be used for new cards as well get a watermark that the hardware is not supported. Well when the hardware would not be supported nobody would see that watermark, absolutely no logic behind AMD driver decisions...

        Comment


        • #84
          KWin and Gnome Shell

          Remember neither KWin nor Gnome Shell works well under Catalyst, on *ANY* card. So the supreme irony of this: in KDE 4.9 you'll see how KDE drops support for the Radeon HD 4000 series, while the MUCH LESSER Intel i945 IGP works like a charm.

          Comment


          • #85
            Originally posted by Alejandro Nova View Post
            Remember neither KWin nor Gnome Shell works well under Catalyst, on *ANY* card. So the supreme irony of this: in KDE 4.9 you'll see how KDE drops support for the Radeon HD 4000 series, while the MUCH LESSER Intel i945 IGP works like a charm.
            Huh? KDE works quite well with the r600g driver.

            Comment


            • #86
              Originally posted by chithanh View Post
              AMD still sells the 980G chipset which was released last year (with 4250 graphics): http://www.amd.com/us/products/deskt...g-chipset.aspx
              The situation with the 740G (Radeon 2100 graphics) chipset from three years ago is now repeating; no fully-featured drivers for modern Linux systems.

              And due to AMD's rebranding-happy marketroids, they drop not only support for 2000/3000/4000 chipsets, but also 5100 and 500V series which are R700 based.
              Nobody ever buys from "AMD's store", they are usually by far the most expensive option. In the brick and mortar stores here in the US I haven't seen anything AMD that wasn't based on the APUs in at least 8 months. Online shops still had a few old bits of old backstock hardware.

              740G? March 4, 2008 (780G, 740G). 890G? March 2, 2010 (890GX) HD4290. 900 series? It has no IGP chipset. If you want an IGP on current AMD hardware you're looking at getting an APU(CPU/GPU/Memory Controller/Northbridge) Parts using it are the Z, C, E, E2, A4, A6 and A8 series parts makeup the current consumer grade lineup from tablet to midrange desktop. Slowest is the C-30 1.2Ghz 64 bit single core, HD6250 80 shaders@280Mhz. Fastest is the A8-3870K 3Ghz 64 bit quad core, HD6550D 400 shaders@600Mhz

              Comment


              • #87
                Originally posted by Kano View Post
                @Kivada
                *snip* But did you ever see prelaunch AMD OSS drivers? AMD is so stupid with their PCI ID whitelist approach that even binary drivers which can be used for new cards as well get a watermark that the hardware is not supported. Well when the hardware would not be supported nobody would see that watermark, absolutely no logic behind AMD driver decisions...
                First off, Holy text block Batman!

                Yeah, well like I said, Intel has allot more OSS driver devs as well as they have like a decade of lead time(I have no idea when Intel started making their OSS driver) on AMD in producing OSS drivers.

                Now though, Intel's HD Graphics 4000 will have to contend with the HD7660D on the A10 series that will be out in a few months, not the current HD6000 series GPUs. The bottom end will probably finally be beaten by the updated Atoms as AMD axed the die shrink to Brazos as it was only going to be on the market about 6 months before the Tamesh series was to go into production, So we're getting a speed bump called Brazos 2.0, Fastest being the AMD E2-1800 which is rumored to be 1.7Ghz dual core 64 bit HD7340 80 shaders@680Mhz.

                Comment


                • #88
                  Originally posted by oliver View Post
                  They don't 'stop' nouveau, they said,
                  They said that? Source please...
                  Originally posted by oliver View Post
                  nVidia's CEO once said (and I'd love to find that quote again), that he'd never do opensource drivers, he saw it more of an disease if anything
                  That's interesting and worrying if true... could you try and back up the claim and find a source for this?

                  Originally posted by Hamish Wilson View Post
                  If I wanted the blob I would use CentOS or some other longer term supported distro, as Fedora and the like do not really work well with the blob anyway. In fact, for the people I know that use the blob this would be the best solution anyway.
                  You may be surprised, but not all Linux users are technical enough or care enough to bother to install a different distro so their graphics card will work with fglrx. I know a few people that run Ubuntu and have never stepped outside of that ecosystem. They still always update and try and keep the latest version of their OS, so next time they try and do an upgrade to a new major release with this hardware and using fglrx they'll be in for a nasty surprise. IMHO this kind of thing is another obstacle hampering further widespread adoption of Linux as a desktop platform.

                  Originally posted by susikala View Post
                  Then AMD drops blob support, which is the expected things to do after you open source your specs, and what happens? people complain.
                  I think the point is that many don't believe the opensource driver is performant or complete enough to handle what people are using their cards for. I've already seen someone mention in this thread that some games they would like to run do not work or render correctly with the FOSS drivers. I'm also not sure I see how dropping support in the blob will automatically benefit the development of the FOSS driver, unless you think they're going to invest more money into it's development?

                  It seems to me that AMD are useless in providing adequate support for the binary blob, but also don't have enough implemented in the FOSS drivers, so it's a no-win situation at the moment for the consumer and for AMD. It's a pity they can't invest more time, effort and money into bringing the FOSS drivers to feature parity and at least close to blob performance for chipsets they are about to drop the blob support for... why can't they do this anyway?

                  Finally - having used both nVIDIA and ATi/AMD cards on Linux, in the past I'd never had an issue with getting an older NVIDIA card (even with the legacy drivers) to work under a new distro (with a newish X.Org) on their binary blob, but had countless problems when I tried the same with fglrx. If nVIDIA can do this on their binary blob, why can't AMD? (Note: I'd prefer proper FOSS support too, but I thought I'd ask the question)

                  Comment


                  • #89
                    Originally posted by del_diablo View Post
                    I think I agree with some of the critic earlier in the thread: A part of the problem is too on the FLOSS side, there is no part of the API that will remain stable for several years of updates, while on Windows we know for a fact that a service pack won't break it
                    Lemme stop you right there, they'll likely do what they did with the previous hardware support drop, drop support for OpenGL 3/DirectX 10 class hardware for Windows as well, Windows 8 would then only support DirectX 11 class hardware. This has several benefits for them, but it's not the "planned obsolesce" many are thinking it is, what it gains them is forcing the OEMs to have to use at least semi current hardware with the AMD boxes they are pushing, which means better sales and a better customer satisfaction with nongeeks that make up 99% of the market as they won't be getting woefully outdated hardware with a bloated OS like what happened with Vista and the POS boxes the OEMs where putting on the market.

                    If you don't like this, switch distros, regular ass Debian should cover you, as would Ubuntu 12.04 or Mint 13 and RHEL based distros like CentOS will also cover you till you decide to buy a new GPU or more likely you buy a whole new computer by then.

                    Comment


                    • #90
                      Originally posted by Kamikaze View Post
                      You may be surprised, but not all Linux users are technical enough or care enough to bother to install a different distro so their graphics card will work with fglrx. I know a few people that run Ubuntu and have never stepped outside of that ecosystem. They still always update and try and keep the latest version of their OS, so next time they try and do an upgrade to a new major release with this hardware and using fglrx they'll be in for a nasty surprise. IMHO this kind of thing is another obstacle hampering further widespread adoption of Linux as a desktop platform.
                      If they managed to find Ubuntu they can find how to stay on 12.04 or move to Debian. I'm certain the Mint guys will be scouring the net in the coming months to snipe Ubuntu users to move to Mint13.

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X