AMD Linux Catalyst: Hardware Owners Screwed?

[RussianNeuroMancer]

2) some performance in 3d applications (always sucked with open drivers, even in nvidia\nouveau systems)
3) some performance in 2d environment (not bad but sometimes you can feel the system is not so smooth as it should be) (using gnome-shell lately, but I am coming from a 2-years-old compiz-standalone configuration)

Try this: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...717#post265717

[Berseker]

thank you, but It doesn't seem very different from before.
Also I was already using pcie2 by following the kernel loading line method

 linux //vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/.... radeon.pcie_gen2=1

[V!NCENT]

I'm not going to go through all this jumping-to-braindead-conclusion crap posted here, but all I know is that;
A. Proprietary sucks;
B. The best open driver performance comes from AMD. Both nVidia and Intel suck balls on this front;
C. AMD has been realy great for free software and Linux lately with CoreBoot and Gallium3D;
D. If Bridgman sais it's in line with what was requested here, it probably ownes, which leads me to the last point;
E. Case closed.

[Panix]

I'm not going to go through all this jumping-to-braindead-conclusion crap posted here, but all I know is that;
A. Proprietary sucks;
B. The best open driver performance comes from AMD. Both nVidia and Intel suck balls on this front;
C. AMD has been realy great for free software and Linux lately with CoreBoot and Gallium3D;
D. If Bridgman sais it's in line with what was requested here, it probably ownes, which leads me to the last point;
E. Case closed.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

Tons of features still don't work or aren't supported yet or will never be supported. So much for FREE / OPEN drivers.

2D decoding - NO. Have to rely on CPU power thereby wasting resources which the video card should and can do.

3D - Most are WIP or 'To Do' - other features aren't supported at all. HDMI audio and hybrid graphics still doesn't work so if you have a laptop, your graphics capabilities are totally crippled. If using a desktop card, many features are unavailable to you even though the drivers are supposedly 'open.'

I guess your claims are illustrating a total failure.

[johnc]

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

Tons of features still don't work or aren't supported yet or will never be supported. So much for FREE / OPEN drivers.

2D decoding - NO. Have to rely on CPU power thereby wasting resources which the video card should and can do.

3D - Most are WIP or 'To Do' - other features aren't supported at all. HDMI audio and hybrid graphics still doesn't work so if you have a laptop, your graphics capabilities are totally crippled. If using a desktop card, many features are unavailable to you even though the drivers are supposedly 'open.'

I guess your claims are illustrating a total failure.

We're not supposed to concern ourselves with that kind of stuff.

The only thing that matters is that it's open source.

Whether it works or not isn't that important.

[DanL]

2D decoding - NO. Have to rely on CPU power thereby wasting resources which the video card should and can do.

That's just incorrect. Open-source radeon uses EXA, which is very smooth in my experience (with low-end radeon hardware). 2D is one area where radeon > fglrx.

HDMI audio and hybrid graphics still doesn't work so if you have a laptop, your graphics capabilities are totally crippled.

Wrong again. HDMI audio works fine on most r600/r700 (though you have to manually enable it on r700). Also, one can use vgaswitcheroo for hybrid graphics systems that have r600/r700 hardware.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

It's funny that you link there, but apparently, you didn't read it (or your reading comprehension is sorely lacking).

I guess your claims are illustrating a total failure.

No, your claims are a total failure.

[wizard69]

There is not enough cheese in the world to go with this whine.

Seriously folks AMD is doing the right thing here, in some cases what the community asks for. As for every bodies concern about their legacy hardware, well I have some 486 hardware in the cellar, that would give you guys plenty of things to agonize over.

[diriel]

Wizard69

Difference is, my 3870 will still play most games pretty well. A 486 is just plain OLD and crusty... but what ever makes you feel better

[gururise]

I and many other AMD R600 users are very dissapointed that AMD decided to drop support for our (not so old) cards. At least provide us with a legacy branch that gives minimal bug fixes, but keeps provided a driver to work with new releases of the Kernal and X.Org.

The OSS drivers are a nice feature; however, they come nowhere near the performance they need to be at to be used as a replacement driver for gamers. AMD has to be aware of this situation... why would they drop support when the OSS drivers are still so far behind in performance??

[gururise]

Seriously folks AMD is doing the right thing here, in some cases what the community asks for. As for every bodies concern about their legacy hardware, well I have some 486 hardware in the cellar, that would give you guys plenty of things to agonize over.

The problem is, the 4870 card I have is only a few years old (released June 2008) and is much newer than that old 486 you have in your basement. In fact, the Radeon 4870 came out just 5 months before the Intel i7-920 CPU was released. Also, the 4870 is still a very capable card, able to play most modern games at high resolutions (if I'm using Catalyst driver). Going forward, I now need to decide between updating my Linux distro (and losing support for my GPU) or keeping the current version of Catalyst and never updating my Linux distro. This really really sucks.