AMD Linux Catalyst: Hardware Owners Screwed?

[YaPeL]

Well, I was very happy with GT440, which worked perfectly well even with nouveau.

mmm it performs a little less than the 4770, guess I'll switch to the 450 gts

[Azpegath]

I've been about to comment on these "AMD drops support for 4000-series" articles since I own one, and since I think it's at least two years too soon to drop support for it. I mean, I got my Radeon 4850 about 3 years ago and at the time it was the second-best generation you could buy. It wasn't the most expensive card on the market, since the 5000 series had come out, but it was about $300 if I remember correctly.

BUT. The reason I haven't actually commented is that the reason I bought AMD was their FOSS support, and I've been using the FOSS drivers ever since (thank you Bridgman and guys!). At first, I don't think it even supported the R700-chip, so I had to use Catalyst for a couple of months, but since the experimental (beta?) 2D support was released, I switched and have never really switched back. So even though I think it's a shame they're dropping R700 support (why not only R500 since it's a lot older), it won't affect me that much. But of course that's just me.

[YaPeL]

Well to be honest I'm pretty happy with the FOSS support, and I have used it for months, but with all these humble edition and stuff, kind of I came back to gaming.

[Azpegath]

Well to be honest I'm pretty happy with the FOSS support, and I have used it for months, but with all these humble edition and stuff, kind of I came back to gaming.

I do some graphics and game programming, but the FOSS drivers has been enough for me since either I use OpenGL2.1 (will do 3 now though) or Irrlicht (which automatically uses the latest and greatest). I've bought all bundles, but haven't really played them that much. Will finish Psychonauts now though, since I've played through most of it before, and now that I can play it in Linux instead of in Windows.
It would be nice to see default S3TC support and floating-point textures though. I don't know if they're enabled by default in Gentoo builds.

[DanL]

mmm it performs a little less than the 4770, guess I'll switch to the 450 gts

I'd spend the extra few dollars to get a GTX 550Ti (192-bit memory interface and higher core clock).

[YaPeL]

Well thats nice, however 2d acceleration on Foss its a little worse than fglrx, which compared to the nvidia blob completly sux, so, for now its a bye bye to ati, not that I'm mad, the 4770 was a tremendous card.

[YaPeL]

I'd spend the extra few dollars to get a GTX 550Ti (192-bit memory interface and higher core clock).

mmm my 450 is going to be a used one, I'm happy with how my 4770 performs, and the gtx 550ti its way to expensive and (powerful?) for my old e4400.

[ArtKun]

I'd spend the extra few dollars to get a GTX 550Ti (192-bit memory interface and higher core clock).

I've been using GTX 550 Ti for a year, and I think it's a waste of money if you're not a hardcore gamer It's a very powerful card, but it consumes A LOT of power and produces A LOT of noise. I don't see any sense in using it on Linux, unless you have Windows in dualboot.

Now I'm using A8-3870K APU with HD 6550D integrated graphics. It works very fast in Windows (about 35 FPS in Call of Pripyat with "High" settings and DX11), but gnome-shell with catalyst 12.6 is a bit slow (while it's not usable at all with opensource driver due to very bad gnome-shell perfomance, and I also had random kernel panics). KWin works flawlessly, though. Also, suspending doesn't work for me - PC doesn't wake up. But there's finally no noise in my room - 400W power supply with passive cooling is enough for my system, and CPU temperature is about 40C with 600rpm fan speed.

[Gusar]

It would be nice to see default S3TC support and floating-point textures though. I don't know if they're enabled by default in Gentoo builds.

Float textures are enabled by default. S3TC isn't part of mesa, so it's not there by default, but a simple "emerge libtxc_dxtn" will do it.

[GreatEmerald]

I just want to mention that as of late, the OSS driver/Wine has been improved a lot. I recall that just a few months ago, trying to launch either Heroes of Might and Magic III or anything using Unreal Engine 2 would result in an instant crash on OSS drivers. Now they both work. With issues (HoMM3 tends to not refresh the screen every now and then, while UE2 games give me 10 FPS as opposed to 60 FPS on Catalyst), but it's still a great improvement, and if that's kept up, soon I won't need to bother with Catalyst at all. If I won't upgrade my card, anyway (but for that I need a better reason than AMD dropping its support).