Ubuntu Is Deprecating fglrx (Catalyst) In 16.04 LTS

[bridgman]

They mean they're depreciating the old Catalyst, right? Not the new one that uses AMDGPU, right? I mean the new one isn't released as far as I know, but that has to be what they mean.

Correct. We are starting to wind down Catalyst Linux and focus on amdgpu-based stacks instead. That means the 16.04 release will ship with just the all-open stacks, but with hybrid stacks following soon. The intent is to give you all the things you like about the open source stack plus the gaming performance of Linux Catalyst.

[twriter]

For those who don't know, I manage AMD's open source graphics team. We (AMD) are focusing our Linux graphics driver development on the amdgpu based open source and upcoming hybrid stacks; consequently, we are not supporting fglrx on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Users who require Pro-graphics or Workstation class features and performance can continue to use fglrx on Ubuntu 14.04 until the hybrid stack is available later this year.

[asdfblah]

So, this is official...? fglrx has been deprecated by AMD? WTF? What about older cards and OpenGL 4.5 / OpenCL (in R600), ...?

[theriddick]

Think the new one is called DAL display driver or something, but I'll be surprised if its ready for Kernel 4.6 release.

[twriter]

Think the new one is called DAL display driver or something, but I'll be surprised if its ready for Kernel 4.6 release.

DAL is just the new display subcomponent which improves on the existing support in the amdgpu KMS driver.

[bridgman]

So, this is official...? fglrx has been deprecated by AMD? WTF? What about older cards and OpenGL 4.5 / OpenCL (in R600), ...?

Nope, but for consumer users (as opposed to workstation / enterprise distro users) we are trying to move fairly quickly from Linux Catalyst to amdgpu hybrid.

[przemoli]

twriter bridgman
Vulkan support would sweateen the deal a bit. Hurry up folks

[MrCooper]

It would be great, if the open source alternative was actually feature complete. No overdrive, no crossfire, no eyefinity, buggy video acceleration

Buggy how? AFAIK the open source video acceleration support is overall vastly superior to Catalyst's.

and there is not even application controlled vsync.

Of course there is. Are you referring to Option "SwapbuffersWait" being enabled by default? That seems easy enough to address (BTW that option is ineffective with glamor, i.e. with all GPUs still supported by Catalyst).

And of course, the ever returning stdc++ library conflict, so people have to keep deleting files from games and steam to get them to work.

You'd have to take it up with Valve why they insist on unnecessarily overriding system libraries with older versions in the Steam runtime (this doesn't affect only libstdc++, their old versions of other libraries have caused problems with other drivers as well). Anyway, no need to delete anything, setting LD_PRELOAD for the affected libraries works.

[tomtomme]

R600 and RadeonSI should be the default but FGLRX shouldn't be deprecated until the FOSS drivers have parity with the proprietary ones. In many cases, FGLRX is still faster and also supports OpenGL 4.5. In my experience, FGLRX is also more stable than R600 with some games. Games like Saints Row 4 will cause R600 git w/ OGL 4.1 support to hard lock the system and often with strange screen artifacts while it runs okay with FGLRX.

Seriously? You compare a released drivers stability to the stability of a alpha (git) quality driver?

[azari]

Correct. We are starting to wind down Catalyst Linux and focus on amdgpu-based stacks instead. That means the 16.04 release will ship with just the all-open stacks, but with hybrid stacks following soon. The intent is to give you all the things you like about the open source stack plus the gaming performance of Linux Catalyst.

Any news yet regarding GCN 1.0 in amdgpu? it seems to be taking a long time to decide whether it'll be supported or not, and meanwhile a lot of people out there will be (and already are) spreading FUD about how catalyst/crimson support is ending for GCN 1.0, even though it's not yet decided; this will get worse now that Canonical has made this announcement as speculation about what amdgpu will/wont support will run rampant. =\