Latest On AMD Crimson For Linux: Supports 4.x Kernels, Drops Pre-GCN GPUs

[PsynoKhi0]

Here we go again...

I'm intrigued: those of you who claim AMD "dropped support" for your card, what component of Catalyst are you missing when running the FOSS drivers?

[xeekei]

Fixed that for you. If you really think that any driver in the kernel will have support forever, especially in a moving area like graphics drivers, you are utterly mistaken.

So? If "nobody cares", then nobody cares.

Use the open source driver if you have an old card. People in these forums always whine about the proprietary driver anyway.
I agree that this "Crimson" driver is underwhelming, especially considering that the Omega driver release was a good boost.

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

Here we go again...

I'm intrigued: those of you who claim AMD "dropped support" for your card, what component of Catalyst are you missing when running the FOSS drivers?

The component that performs well? Just kidding -- In all honesty, I'm typically pleased with the performance of the open source drivers. Still, the pun was there for the taking, I could not resist.

[dungeon]

Here we go again...

I'm intrigued: those of you who claim AMD "dropped support" for your card, what component of Catalyst are you missing when running the FOSS drivers?

I don't think they missed much, as hardware is older... no driver can make old hardware to fly like new hardware can, etc... Whoever wants to stick with that Catalyst can stick with some workstation release distros, this does not mean end of usability of that driver. It mainly mean, you can't roll kernels and X freely.

Same as for Windows user, recommendation is to stick with Windows 7 if something does not work or not work well for your hardware in 10

[chithanh]

I have a 6870 (Northern Islands) and I never felt the need to use the proprietary drivers. Tesselation and OpenCL could be a reason, but the former is coming to open source drivers and my card isn't that great for the latter anyway.

I can't build crimson on my dual gpu laptop with an NI and an GCN GPU "HD 8650G/8670M".
If i choose HD 8000M on AMD homepage it let's me download crimson driver but it can't be installed.
Log shows "./amd_dcm64: No supported adapters detected".

Not surprising.

Last time when R600 generation got moved to legacy, it was also the AMD/AMD hybrid graphics owners who got the short end of the stick: Those who had legacy internal graphics and discrete non-legacy graphics had to use the legacy driver.
Lesson learnt: Avoid AMD/AMD hybrid graphics if you depend on their latest proprietary driver.

[Nille_kungen]

I have a 6870 (Northern Islands) and I never felt the need to use the proprietary drivers. Tesselation and OpenCL could be a reason, but the former is coming to open source drivers and my card isn't that great for the latter anyway.

Not surprising.

Last time when R600 generation got moved to legacy, it was also the AMD/AMD hybrid graphics owners who got the short end of the stick: Those who had legacy internal graphics and discrete non-legacy graphics had to use the legacy driver.
Lesson learnt: Avoid AMD/AMD hybrid graphics if you depend on their latest proprietary driver.

I'm not avoiding anything and will buy a new AMD based laptop next year.
The only thing i used catalyst for was for one game i played in wine that wouldn't run with radeon on my hardware.

[MrCooper]

And mesa is still supporting r200 (released in 2001) cards and newer, [...]

Mesa still supports R100 as well.

[smitty3268]

Can this pre GCN drop have anything to do with vulcan support? since only GCN cards will get vulcan.

Actually it has everything to do with DX12 support.

Because everything in the fglrx driver is driven by Windows - the entire Crimson release is driven by the Windows changes they are making. Linux is just along for the ride.

They want to separate out the current DX12 hardware with drivers they update all the time, from the previous legacy hardware which won't support DX12, and which are entering their legacy drivers which are hardly ever updated. On windows, that doesn't matter so much, but there's no point to them on linux when they so quickly stop working. So you're stuck with the OSS drivers instead (not necessarily a bad thing, anyway).

So I guess in a roundabout way you could say it's about Vulkan support, in as much as Vulkan support lines up pretty much directly with DX12 support.

[Slartifartblast]

I have a RadeonHD 4550. It works great with the open source driver...

It didn't when they dropped HD4000 support in catalyst, the FOSS drivers were crap. No reclocking and your laptop sounded like a vacuum cleaner because the fans were full on due to lack of power management plus a long list of other bugs. They were far from production ready, people seem to have short memories. AMD are in a downward spiral and it's only a matter of time before they either fold or are taken over. It's going to take a lot of effort on AMD's part and some large investor cash injections before I would even consider them again. Intel and Nvidia need some serious competition to keep prices down but I don't see I coming from AMD, it's ARM and friends that are the keeping the up the pricing pressure and that's only in the low end of the market.

Would I like to see AMD as a decently competitive company who supports the customer well ?

Of course.

Do I see that happening ?

I'll paint my arse blue and run down the street naked if that happens.

Nvidia, ten years support - take effing note AMD.

[darkblu]

Here we go again...

I'm intrigued: those of you who claim AMD "dropped support" for your card, what component of Catalyst are you missing when running the FOSS drivers?

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/GalliumCompute/

(my card is Evergreen)