KWin May Drop Support For Catalyst, Vintage GPUs

[RealNC]

One thing I don't get with KWin, is why I can't run the OpenGL ES version of it on the binary drivers (NVidia *and* ATI). AFAIK, OpenGL ES is part of OpenGL 4.2 now, and both drivers support that version. So it should be possible to run the ES version using fglrx or nvidia.

Why isn't that possible?

[e8hffff]

I'm all for dropping old code that's difficult but I hope they wait for AMD to see if they meet the challenge before doing anything drastic.

[smitty3268]

Aren't openGL 2 issues related to the fact the specs have grown into a hodge-podge abomination of vendor extensions?

No, it's really just that the texture from pixmap extension is rather tricky to get right, and the only thing it's used much by is the window compositors. So AMD just never bothered to get it working correctly in direct rendering mode.

[hal2k1]

Exactly.
Who in their right mind would use a driver that offers maximum performance, power saving, HW video acceleration, when they can use a driver that doesn't?

Sigh! Power saving is fully supported by the open source Radeon drivers. In January this year, the OpenGL 3.0 milestone was reached, and Mesa 8 was released. Following that, (not yet released, but it is in the development branch), a significant performance improvement in the form of 2D colour tiling has landed. Whilst still in pre-release development, the next version of Mesa (version 8.1) is already showing between 12% and 30% performance improvement over the current release from just this one optimisation.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA2MTA

Other performance improvements such as HyperZ, enabling PCI-E 2.0, and other changes are in the piplline. The performance gap between the open source drivers and fglrx is rapidly closing.

The gap which is NOT closing is the one where the closed source fglrx is a closed proprietary binary blob, unstable and prone to regressions, adapted from the Windows blob so not suited to or integrated properly with the Linux stack, not fixable (supportable) by the Linux community itself, can't be distributed with Linux distributions, breaks every time there is a kernel update, and won't support KMS (and so may require awkward manual configuration) or Wayland.

[RealNC]

Wait, KWin, the KDE Window Manager which is used by a crapload of Linux users out there is developed by ONLY A SINGLE GUY?!

What the hell? I thought KDE was more popular than that.

[PsynoKhi0]

Erm... Running Kwin with fglrx just fine here.
Though I can do without, and can't blame the devs for dropping legacy support.
Aren't openGL 2 issues related to the fact the specs have grown into a hodge-podge abomination of vendor extensions?

[ChrisXY]

As long as you don't need to rotate screens, and not good dualscreen support. In Ubuntu 11.04 I got screen corruption by rotating with twinview. It went away when rotating back and rotating again. Wasn't good anyway: Once I crashed X by typing xrandr -o left. And you can forget rotating one of two screens without doing some advanced stuff. But hey, who would want to do that anyway, right?

[b3nn0]

I do, because catalyst/fglrx sucks. Have you tried using it? Nearly every release introduces a new major bug. There was a release where HDMI output wouldn't work right, or where catalyst would report multiple preferred resolutions to xrandr (and not even in the correct order), X crashes with xv, gnome 3 wouldn't work for half a year (!!), suspend to ram still doesn't work reliably (ASIC hang happened, hanging unkillable X, ...), etc. etc.

That's a problem of Catalyst, not of proprietary drivers in general.
Had an AMD GFX Card for half a year. Now sold it and bought nvidia.
The Nouveau driver is even worse than the radeon driver. But at least the proprietary drivers work like a charm here...

[ChrisXY]

Exactly.
Who in their right mind would use a driver that offers maximum performance, power saving, HW video acceleration, when they can use a driver that doesn't?

I do, because catalyst/fglrx sucks. Have you tried using it? Nearly every release introduces a new major bug. There was a release where HDMI output wouldn't work right, or where catalyst would report multiple preferred resolutions to xrandr (and not even in the correct order), X crashes with xv, gnome 3 wouldn't work for half a year (!!), suspend to ram still doesn't work reliably (ASIC hang happened, hanging unkillable X, ...), etc. etc.

[bug77]

proprietary drivers suck.

Exactly.
Who in their right mind would use a driver that offers maximum performance, power saving, HW video acceleration, when they can use a driver that doesn't?