AMD's Legacy Driver Will Not Support X Server 1.6

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD's Legacy Driver Will Not Support X Server 1.6

Early this morning we shared that AMD is dropping R300 through R500 support in the Catalyst driver. Beginning with the Catalyst 9.4 release, the Windows and Linux drivers will only support the R600 and R700 series (and eventually, R800) of ATI Radeon graphics processors...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzExOQ

[RealNC]

http://i43.tinypic.com/ej6e1j.jpg

[Pfanne]

well thats kind of "not good" ;)
have fun ranting!

[ethana2]

They gave us documentation, they gave us Free code.
Now they're seeing if we can stand on our own feet.
..We can.

More than nVidia ever did for us; Quit yer yappin'

Look at it this way: AMD just officially gave the Free ATi gpu drivers millions upon millions of testers and bug reporters, and probably many more developers than they themselves could employ for the cause. The actions they've taken, in the order they've taken them in, is excellent; How many resources would you prefer them waste in their phased open source driver transition? Just keep the documentation coming. When we all switch to Gallium3d, the performance deltas will disintegrate.

[SyXbiT]

great argument.

If Linus decided to kill Linux, think of all the free testers BSD and open solaris would get!!!!

STUPID argument

[ethana2]

Linux is Free.
Catalyst is not.

Different argument.

[SyXbiT]

it's perfectly valid.
you're claiming that it's a good thing that they leave paying customer in the cold because it will ensure that they (by being forced to) test the OSS driver.

paying customers shouldn't really be forced.


and, to sum up ATI driver development really well. (and, according to you,)
it will mean that LATER the OSS driver will get better.

yup, with ATI it's always LATER.
so, for the first year the driver is worse, but LATER it might be good.

I'm not sure about you, but i live in the present

[poofyyoda]

paying customers shouldn't really be forced.



I'm not sure about you, but i live in the present


Present eh?, when did you buy your old card? You've had the support you paid for so get over it.
In fact, you should be grateful, that you get a lifeline of continued support in the open drivers,
which is more than you'd ever get from nvidia where their legacy drivers get updated rarely.

[sundown]

How many lines of hard code does a driver need to have, in order to function with a new xorg? Or does it depend on the xorg release itself?

[ethana2]

it's perfectly valid.
you're claiming that it's a good thing that they leave paying customer in the cold because it will ensure that they (by being forced to) test the OSS driver.

paying customers shouldn't really be forced.
If you don't upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 this spring, I'm going to bust a cap up in here. ..but yeah, I do get what you mean.

I'm not sure about you, but i live in the present
That's great! OS X will have LLVM optimized gpu drivers, kernel mode setting, a heavily engineered GUI, unix certification, and an extensive library of native, polished, and powerful software, like, yesterday! (although really, if Snow Leopard doesn't pack a system app store before gnome-apps-add allows you to buy commercial software, someone is going to get owned)

I only dabble in the present; I live in the future.

[Qaridarium]

they gave us documentation, they gave us free code.
Now they're seeing if we can stand on our own feet.
..we can.

More than nvidia ever did for us; quit yer yappin'

look at it this way: Amd just officially gave the free ati gpu drivers millions upon millions of testers and bug reporters, and probably many more developers than they themselves could employ for the cause. The actions they've taken, in the order they've taken them in, is excellent; how many resources would you prefer them waste in their phased open source driver transition? Just keep the documentation coming. When we all switch to gallium3d, the performance deltas will disintegrate.

yes we can :-)

[Hephasteus]

Worked on a radeon 2000 GPU tonight. It's a complete waste of silicon and using it for even web browsing is not a good thing. I'm thinking with the proliferation of HD 4350 cards for 40 bucks and HD 4550 cards for 50 bucks this is a real NON ISSUE.

Now if they are going to dump the 3200 IGPU then they need to rethink that cause it's actually useful for few things. But if you have a slot even a PCI slot you need to put something besides 1000 igpu video in the machine. They should probably consider dumping support for 2000 because shader 3.0 cards of any sort will be useless in the future.

[cruiseoveride]

Hardware: ATi ~ Nvidia
Software: Nvidia >> ATi

[bulletxt]

In only 1 day AMD wants the world to know how much they suck.
I must give them my compliments. There is also 0 reasons for not updating the legacy driver especially considering that the open source driver is FAR, and I sad FAR, from complete. NVIDIA once again beats AMD 10 times.

And I can finally feel in a Michael's AMD article a certain disappointment.

[bridgman]

I seem to remember you asking, on this very site, for someone to kill the fglrx driver as a favour to humanity :D

Other than 3D support (which a bunch of devs are working on now) where do you see the open source driver being deficient ?

[ethana2]

I seem to remember you asking, on this very site, for someone to kill the fglrx driver as a favour to humanity :D

It bothers me a bit to see articles that could be described as 'whiny', because often, being a linux user, I'm marginalized as a 'vocal minority' and someone who 'just wants everything, and for free'.. don't be afraid to save some emotion for the first post in the comment form.

[drag]

great argument.

If Linus decided to kill Linux, think of all the free testers BSD and open solaris would get!!!!

STUPID argument

A. They would get more testers. I am not moving to Windows anytime soon, so are most people using Linux. FreeBSD and OpenSolaris are more and more similar to Linux every day, just that neither use the Linux kernel.

B. Linus can't kill Linux. It's open source and it's not owned by him. Which is the whole point behind "Free" software.


Linux open source ATI drivers still support hardware going back to R200. Why? Because people are still using machines that old and put the effort into it. Once people stop using those old cards then driver support will eventually whither away.

And sure it's going to be irritating for a lot of people. But that's the problem with closed source stuff: Once you stop making money for the owners of the software, why should they care about you? I don't see any reason why they should care about me just because I have a old R400 card laying around.

For long-term Linux operating systems like CentOS or Debian (among others) you can continue using your closed source ATI drivers with supported pre-1.6.0 versions of Xserver for another 5 years or so. No problem. I think Redhat supports their stuff for 7 years; so that is how long CentOS is going to support it. Just because people release newer versions of Linux or X doesn't mean you have to upgrade to them any time soon.

It's kinda funny since one of the perceived benefits of running Windows was their 'stable driver ABI' and whatnot. But it was only 'stable' and compatible with older drivers because Microsoft didn't release a new desktop OS since 2000. (XP being to 2000 what Windows 7 will be to Vista). You can take the same approach with Linux and just not upgrade. Certain distros have good policies for supporting older versions for a number of years.

[val-gaav]

I seem to remember you asking, on this very site, for someone to kill the fglrx driver as a favour to humanity :D

Other than 3D support (which a bunch of devs are working on now) where do you see the open source driver being deficient ?

I wonder if you are not seriouslly pissed ... First the community cries for docs and open drivers and for dropping fglrx ... Now we have quite good open drivers for r300 r400 and r500 ... and everyone cries for the hated and bashed fglrx dropping suppport for those chips. I think I would be pissed at community reaction if I were in your shoes.

Now seriously. three AMD emplyers are still working on open drivers so why the cry for something that you people hated before (fglrx) ? Be constructive and at least cry for new features in the open drives.

[yoshi314]

I wonder if you are not seriouslly pissed ... First the community cries for docs and open drivers and for dropping fglrx ... Now we have quite good open drivers for r300 r400 and r500 ... and everyone cries for the hated and bashed fglrx dropping suppport for those chips. I think I would be pissed at community reaction if I were in your shoes.there is always a lot of social intertia around such changes.

everyone cries for the hated and bashed fglrx dropping suppport for those chipsi don't. and i bet i'm not the only one. so don't say "everyone"

it's a hard decision, but i think it is good. same thing happens with windows drivers - but you can stick with older drivers for that particular windows version (if there is such).

similar thing happened when gentoo dropped xmms from their repository - a massive backlash from many people, who were too attached to obsoleted software that caused a lot of security issues, and headaches for distro maintainers.

but later, people got over it.

[Kjella]

[QUOTE=Hephasteus;65404]Worked on a radeon 2000 GPU tonight. It's a complete waste of silicon and using it for even web browsing is not a good thing. I'm thinking with the proliferation of HD 4350 cards for 40 bucks and HD 4550 cards for 50 bucks this is a real NON ISSUE.{/QUOTE]

I've gotta wonder where you're surfing, because for me that hasn't been a problem for years. Anyway, yes you can drop 40$ into your latest desktop rig. But your laptop? On any other old computer you got standing around?

Basicly there's two things you want, security patches and application updates. No xserver support => no newer distributions => old software. Sure you can try to do a mix-and-match like downgrading your xserver or upgrading your applications while pinning the xserver but you're likely to run into trouble.

I haven't got the impression all your worries will be over if you switch to a HD 4xxx card either. How long until you need your next 40$ fix?

[Laughing1]

(which a bunch of devs are working on now)

So we exchange some devs from fglrx support to the open source radeon driver(s), correct? :)

That sounds like a good exchange. :cool:

[MaestroMaus]

The thing that bothers me most is that the guys who are complaining here have missed the entire point of having open source drivers.

Let me sum things up for you:
1. Linux isn't good at the 3D graphics department right now. Quite honestly, Linux is the worst kid at school in de 3D graphics deparment (that's why the work on the new infrastructure it so goddamn much appreciated). If you use Linux purely out of practical reasons, then your hereby advised to start using Windows/Mac.

2. If you do care about the OSS philosophy, if you do see why it is important that OSS is created, maintained and used over CSS then you should use Linux. And when that is the case, you also understand that getting the specs from ATI is one of the best things they could have done for Linux/OSS. Losing their CSS driver is peanuts compared to it.

[Timo Jyrinki]

I think this is great progress! The fglrx is so shaky, that this results in better reputation of Linux overall - no more "Linux crashes so often" when the fglrx is actually the culprit.

For most ordinary 3D usage, r300-r500 OSS driver is good enough and stable already, and fast enough. It's just the lack of shaders which is preventing things like Doom 3 being fully usable. They will probably all come this year with a lot of radeon-rework Mesa work being already done, so people can stay in previous Linux versions with the crashing fglrx driver and wait for the Autumn releases, or upgrade now in the spring and be satisfied with the lower (1/2 or 1/3 or so) 3D performance for now.

_Hopefully_ this would also mean they can get rid of junk code in fglrx, so that the r600-r700 support would actually be what the users want.

[geamandura]

Worked on a radeon 2000 GPU tonight. It's a complete waste of silicon and using it for even web browsing is not a good thing.

Dude, you're full of fud. I own an HD 2600 XT silent and I'm playing a lot of games (admittedly not GTA 4, but GTR Evolution, Test Drive Unlimited, Fallout 3 etc.) in at least 1024 x 768 and sometimes with antialias. And always with full details.

So you've got something broken in there, maybe you've got a fall back to software rendering or a fall back to fud spreading on the webs, gotta have it checked!

[mirv]

I don't think AMD made this choice lightly - I'm quite sure they're aware of a backlash over older cards not being supported for the newer x server release. I also wonder if the "cutoff line" so to speak has anything to do with opengl3 support. So we can only wait and see what effect this will have with new drivers. I personally haven't had any problems with fglrx for quite some time now, though I would like to see the OSS drivers improve more than I want fglrx to get better.

[rafi]

Too bad, fglrx worked well with my x1600 mobility. I had hope in the 9-3 release, but now it's over :( Good bye PowerPlay, bye bye CCC...
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[Stormking]

when did you buy your old card? You've had the support you paid for so get over it.
When? When did I have my support? When was there ever a version of fglrx that was not broken in some way?

[mirv]

When? When did I have my support? When was there ever a version of fglrx that was not broken in some way?

And what problems have you had? What makes fglrx so terrible for you? Most people have been whining to get rid of the fglrx driver an concentrate on the open source ones - guess what, that just happened for r300/400/500 series cards.
And everybody has had support by AMD opening up documentation to allow for fully open source drivers to be properly developed, which they've been helping to develop in addition to their own closed source binaries. That's pretty supportive I think.

[Stormking]

And what problems have you had? What makes fglrx so terrible for you?
Well, right now it doesn't work at all. Before that, OpenGL didn't work with WINE. And before that, there was no support for Compositing or AIXGL. And before that, it crashed on a regular basis. And before that, XVideo-on-TV-Out was broken for 18 months. Not to mention that the *whole time*, logging out or trying to switch to the console froze the whole system.


Most people have been whining to get rid of the fglrx driver an concentrate on the open source ones
You seem to live in a parallel universe. In my world, people just want a working driver and don't really care if it's open source or not.


AMD opening up documentation to allow for fully open source drivers to be properly developed, which they've been helping to develop in addition to their own closed source binaries. That's pretty supportive I think.
So I have to be thankful that after not being able to deliver a working driver for about five years, ATI now finally decided to do the absolute minimum to help the OSS comunity to write their own driver?


Next time when you buy a brand new car and something is broken, try to imagine the manufacturer promises you to fix it "next month". Five years later - your car still doesn't work - they give you some papers and tell you to fix it yourself.

[grigi]

Other than 3D support (which a bunch of devs are working on now) where do you see the open source driver being deficient ?

In order of importance:

Power management
Redirected direct rendering (DRI2 & GEM/TTM)


Shaders (OpenGL2 / GLSL) would be nice too :p

[BlackStar]

In order of importance:

Power management
Redirected direct rendering (DRI2 & GEM/TTM)


Shaders (OpenGL2 / GLSL) would be nice too :p

++

Redirected direct rendering indirection is on track (hey, why don't you make the acronym bigger, it's amusing!) OpenGL 3.0 support would be awesome, but I don't think it's gonna happen this year. GLSL at least, pretty please?

[MaestroMaus]

You seem to live in a parallel universe. In my world, people just want a working driver and don't really care if it's open source or not.

Why don't u use Windows/Mac then. Or maybe better, why on earth are u using Linux then?

[spykes]

Phoronix: AMD's Legacy Driver Will Not Support X Server 1.6

Early this morning we shared that AMD is dropping R300 through R500 support in the Catalyst driver. Beginning with the Catalyst 9.4 release, the Windows and Linux drivers will only support the R600 and R700 series (and eventually, R800) of ATI Radeon graphics processors...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzExOQ


It's an inevitable move with a proprietary solution... However it comes a bit too soon IMHO, because the free alternative has still a long way to go before it reaches a complete expected feature set (with stability and performance).

[mirv]

Well, right now it doesn't work at all. Before that, OpenGL didn't work with WINE. And before that, there was no support for Compositing or AIXGL. And before that, it crashed on a regular basis. And before that, XVideo-on-TV-Out was broken for 18 months. Not to mention that the *whole time*, logging out or trying to switch to the console froze the whole system.

Are you saying that you have currently have no opengl in wine, no compositing, no aiglx, regular crashes, and no tv-out? Last I checked, AMD had addressed all these issues, so what exactly is the problem? "Doesn't work at all" isn't very descriptive you see - you have no x output at all, or what?

You seem to live in a parallel universe. In my world, people just want a working driver and don't really care if it's open source or not.

Yes. I live in a parallel universe. It's called "reality".


So I have to be thankful that after not being able to deliver a working driver for about five years, ATI now finally decided to do the absolute minimum to help the OSS comunity to write their own driver?

AMD/ATI's drivers have dramatically improved in the past two years, since they properly started to support linux for the consumer. And their "minimum" help was more than OSS community was asking for.

Next time when you buy a brand new car and something is broken, try to imagine the manufacturer promises you to fix it "next month". Five years later - your car still doesn't work - they give you some papers and tell you to fix it yourself.

This analogy is so full of holes that not even a disused space station such as B5 could be used to plug them.

I get that you want to rant on and vent some frustration. Fair enough. But it's time for reasonable discussion now.

[Stormking]

Why don't u use Windows/Mac then. Or maybe better, why on earth are u using Linux then?
Are you serious? In your mind the only reason to use Linux is because it's free?

Are you saying that you have currently have no opengl in wine, no compositing, no aiglx, regular crashes, and no tv-out? Last I checked, AMD had addressed all these issues, so what exactly is the problem? "Doesn't work at all" isn't very descriptive you see - you have no x output at all, or what?
First, there were minor quirks like the freezing issue (no, it never got fixed for me). Then, suddenly, the video overlay did not work on tv-out, anymore. This was left unfixed for 18 months. In the meantime, "Textured Video" was introduced, what helped a little bit but was far from stable. Then, suddenly, it got disabled on the second head.

Both got fixed, eventually, so that after 20 months I had XV on TV-Out, again. Did I mention that ATI teached me patience?

Soon after that the driver became more and more unstable. Than the new codebase was introduced and was supposed to bring Compositing and AIXGL. Of course, it didn't work at first. But I was still patient.

Than, support for XServer 1.5 was introduced, so that I could finally upgrade my distribution. But instead of this, fglrx stopped to work, completely. It still doesn't.


Yes. I live in a parallel universe. It's called "reality".
So in your so-called "reality", there are only mainstream Windows users and hardcore Open Source Evangelists? Nothing in between? Seems to me like a very limited "reality".


AMD/ATI's drivers have dramatically improved in the past two years,

Not for me. Instead, it got worse. Whenever something was fixed, another, even bigger problem appeared.

[smorovic]

OK, that's not a good choice by AMD. Supporting recent Xserver is not a huge work (as a driver can still usually use API's from previous versions, maybe with minor tweaks), and sometimes it's just recompiling.

If Ubuntu R300-R500 geeks start spamming ATI support forums and channels, they will start thinking about releasing an update for the 1.6. Although Canonical is maybe crazy enough to downgrade to 1.5 just because of binary blob compatibility (if they weren't pushed by Fedora to go more with the bleeding edge stuff).

[MaestroMaus]

Are you serious? In your mind the only reason to use Linux is because it's free?

Dodging the question by asking one yourself won't help. It still isn't polite either.

Since you seem to mix up open source software with free, I'll explain why I think it is important to have access tot the source code of programs:
1. It allows for debates and different views on how something should be programmed best. Professionals from all over the world and from different company's can look at the code, and debate about what's the best thing to do. I know it has a flip side, but I'll consider that necessary evil.
2. It allows professionals to check whether is has security errors, which is very important in a world where virtually everything is connected by computers.
3. It doesn't make you dependant. Open source software doesn't limit you to specific file types or programs that other Operating Systems can not have. This makes it possible to switch any time you like.

Oh and one other thing, Open source software isn't free (it is, if you choose to be irresponsible). OSS will only get moving when governments/company's/users keep/start contributing to it in any fashion; whether it is by hacking themselves, or by donating money (I donate money to the Gnome Foundation if you wish to know).

Can you answer my question now, please?

[Kazade]

I'm a bit pissed. Not because AMD are dropping support for the old chipsets, I know what it's like maintaining legacy codebases and I think it's a good idea.

What I'm pissed about is that if they just recompiled the driver for X server 1.6 the people that want to use Catalyst 9.3 could have done so for the next 6 months at least, until the next X server upgrade hits the major distros. But now they won't even be able to use it with Ubuntu 9.04. :(

[bulletxt]

I seem to remember you asking, on this very site, for someone to kill the fglrx driver as a favour to humanity :D

Other than 3D support (which a bunch of devs are working on now) where do you see the open source driver being deficient ?

I may be wrong but I think remembering I suggested to kill the driver and make the people working on it move to the open source development work.

Anyways I'll bounce the question back to you:

If I have an ATI 9600XT card, how exactly will it work? Is everything complete (excluding 3d)? Is 2d accelleration really done? Xv? etc etc etc .

[bridgman]

AFAIK everything except 3D is already working at least as well as fglrx. EXA, XAA and Xv are all supported, including both textured video and overlay.

Overlay is tear-free, not sure if textured video is tear-free today (might just be 5xx and up).

Video is flicker-free with compiz but the usual tearing issues apply (since with a compositor you want the compositor to sync to vblank, not the Xv driver, and that is still iffy with Compiz).

[BlackStar]

I may be wrong but I think remembering I suggested to kill the driver and make the people working on it move to the open source development work.

Anyways I'll bounce the question back to you:

If I have an ATI 9600XT card, how exactly will it work? Is everything complete (excluding 3d)? Is 2d accelleration really done? Xv? etc etc etc .

Why don't you try it?

(To answer your questions, great, yes yes and yes).

[ivanovic]

If I have an ATI 9600XT card, how exactly will it work? Is everything complete (excluding 3d)? Is 2d accelleration really done? Xv? etc etc etc .

Before I got my HD3850 more than a year ago, I had a 9800pro in my box and was excplusivly using the open drivers. That is there you don't NEED specific 2D acceleration since the 2D part is a hardware part, not done via the shaders as required for r6xx+. The same is for Xv. It just worked perfectly with the open drivers.

So yes, with an 9600 you are by far better off using the open source xf86-video-ati driver. At least when I was using that old box there was not a single problem with the open driver when it came to watching Videos and normal work in 2D. That is it was *rock* solid and my box running for >100 days. I only restarted when I wanted to upgrade the kernel at that time.

So switch to the open drivers, you might enjoy them! The only part not good about them (at least at that time) is/was 3D performance since that was barely usable.

[Odin]

That's a great news for my desktop rig (HD4850), but a sad one for my notebook (Mobility X1600). My only choice is to stick to e.g. Ubuntu 8.04 or switch to the OSS-drivers and lose 3D-support...nevertheless I appreciate this decision - as long as there will be significant improvements.

[sundown]

AFAIK everything except 3D is already working at least as well as fglrx. EXA, XAA and Xv are all supported, including both textured video and overlay.

True with the "ati/radeon" driver. I even play Nexuiz on 1280x800 and everything else set to low and is very playable on my mobility radeon. True, no eye candy, but still.

Overlay is tear-free, not sure if textured video is tear-free today (might just be 5xx and up). Textured video is tear-free, that is true too, at least I know it is for r500. You don't even need to use that textured-video-vsync-vblank-whatever option. Still you need a good CPU to playback 720p and above, otherwise it is a drag.


Video is flicker-free with compiz but the usual tearing issues apply (since with a compositor you want the compositor to sync to vblank, not the Xv driver, and that is still iffy with Compiz). That's tru, but who cares :)?

[Hephasteus]

[QUOTE=Hephasteus;65404]Worked on a radeon 2000 GPU tonight. It's a complete waste of silicon and using it for even web browsing is not a good thing. I'm thinking with the proliferation of HD 4350 cards for 40 bucks and HD 4550 cards for 50 bucks this is a real NON ISSUE.{/QUOTE]

I've gotta wonder where you're surfing, because for me that hasn't been a problem for years. Anyway, yes you can drop 40$ into your latest desktop rig. But your laptop? On any other old computer you got standing around?

Basicly there's two things you want, security patches and application updates. No xserver support => no newer distributions => old software. Sure you can try to do a mix-and-match like downgrading your xserver or upgrading your applications while pinning the xserver but you're likely to run into trouble.

I haven't got the impression all your worries will be over if you switch to a HD 4xxx card either. How long until you need your next 40$ fix?

It's a hard balance between being wasteful and being excessively attached to old hardware. The hardware I was talking about was neices computer. It's a HP with built in radeon 2000 graphics and a 3.2 ghz prescott pentium 4 that bounces all over the place on it's operating frequency making a potentially fast and good computer a train wreck with stalling video and jerky mouse.

People need to stop letting companies integrate horrible graphics into systems. When ati was integrating 1000 graphics into computers they should have been integrating 2000 graphics into them. When they were integrating 2000 graphics into systems they should have been integrating 3000 graphics into systems. Here we are today with 880G supposedly being the hot integrated graphics platform of this year. Who knows what nvidia will respond to this with. It's basically a radeon 3450 chip integrated in. It should be a radeon 4550 chip integrated. Once this game gets into the cpu market they are going to be integrating the stupidest worst architectures they can to make your cpu worthless as soon as they possibly can.

The system has to shrink and you can bet it's going to shrink down into the most obsoletable form that people can tolerate.

But as people have said the 1000 doesn't have any capabilities. Pretending it does and warranting a place for in the evolution of X and all the graphical layers it needs to be to get where it needs to go is rediculous. If the open source driver can show a desktop and handle 2d then so be it. Trying to do 3d with it at modern resolutions doesn't work and isn't worth the effort to try. Personally I think they should dump 2000 also and move forward with shader 4.0 progress.

[Ant P.]

There's a lot of clueless whiners in this topic.


I've got a R300 sitting around somewhere (which just about still works - hardware fault). Is there anything I can help with?

[bridgman]

It's a hard balance between being wasteful and being excessively attached to old hardware. The hardware I was talking about was neices computer. It's a HP with built in radeon 2000 graphics and a 3.2 ghz prescott pentium 4 that bounces all over the place on it's operating frequency making a potentially fast and good computer a train wreck with stalling video and jerky mouse.

People need to stop letting companies integrate horrible graphics into systems. When ati was integrating 1000 graphics into computers they should have been integrating 2000 graphics into them. When they were integrating 2000 graphics into systems they should have been integrating 3000 graphics into systems. Here we are today with 880G supposedly being the hot integrated graphics platform of this year. Who knows what nvidia will respond to this with. It's basically a radeon 3450 chip integrated in. It should be a radeon 4550 chip integrated. Once this game gets into the cpu market they are going to be integrating the stupidest worst architectures they can to make your cpu worthless as soon as they possibly can.

The system has to shrink and you can bet it's going to shrink down into the most obsoletable form that people can tolerate.

But as people have said the 1000 doesn't have any capabilities. Pretending it does and warranting a place for in the evolution of X and all the graphical layers it needs to be to get where it needs to go is rediculous. If the open source driver can show a desktop and handle 2d then so be it. Trying to do 3d with it at modern resolutions doesn't work and isn't worth the effort to try. Personally I think they should dump 2000 also and move forward with shader 4.0 progress.

OK, I think I see where the confusion is coming from here. If you're running with a P4 then you don't have Radeon 2000 graphics, you probably have a Radeon 200M aka RS400. That is a cut-down X300 with two pipes (vs four pipes on X300) and is *really* slow compared to more recent ATI graphics.

The closest thing to "radeon 2000 graphics" in an IGP would be the "Radeon 2100 graphics" in an rs740, an enhanced rs690.

The GPU in an rs780 IGP ("Radeon 3100/3200/3300 graphics") is maybe 4 times as fast as your Xpress 200, with maybe 8 times the shader power.

[The_Monkey_King]

Interesting note. We gripe (well, I know I certainly do) about the lack of supported features in Linux that Windows enjoys. But I do understand about dropping support for legacy hardware.

In Windows we have patches and service packs that do rewrite kernel level code (XP SP2!) but it is not the same as versions of Linux kernel or X Server versions. To ask AMD/ATI to do so is not good business practices on their part.How much of an unknowing future are they expected to support?

What I will agree is needed...AMD/ATI needs to have drivers that fully exploit the features as listed on their marketing and on their boxes. To not do so, and then drop support to leagacy is false advertising. So if this means they have drawn a line in the sand and said from here we drop to legacy and here we begin our new attack on fully featured drivers, then more power to them and I wish them the best.



On a side note, I got tired of waiting. I went ahead and bought the nVidia ASUS EN8400GS (512M) which offered a $10 rebate ($29). I will be working on the HTPC and Mythbuntu/Boxee in the coming weeks, disabling the onboard RS790GX. Sorry, I could no longer wait. I did that with the RS690.

[r1348]

Hello, I just read on an italian news site that AMD will supply legacy driver updates for <R600 cards every 3 months on Windows, so support won't be entirely discontinued.
Will this happen also on linux? (mind there's a RIGHT answer and a WRONG answer here :P )

[Hephasteus]

OK, I think I see where the confusion is coming from here. If you're running with a P4 then you don't have Radeon 2000 graphics, you probably have a Radeon 200M aka RS400. That is a cut-down X300 with two pipes (vs four pipes on X300) and is *really* slow compared to more recent ATI graphics.

The closest thing to "radeon 2000 graphics" in an IGP would be the "Radeon 2100 graphics" in an rs740, an enhanced rs690.

The GPU in an rs780 IGP ("Radeon 3100/3200/3300 graphics") is maybe 4 times as fast as your Xpress 200, with maybe 8 times the shader power.

OH ya you are right it's called Xpress 200. It is 2 rops but it's not mine. Basically anything listed on integrated graphics below the radeon hd 3200 on amd's driver list should go from support and basic spinoff driver should be put out so x and everything running can just say you don't have the hardware to run this when you try to run 3d things.

More recent ati graphics in integrated department are "REALLY SLOW" as well as from nvidia and via. As I said the first cpu's that have onboard gpu's are likely to get a big WTF? from everyone as the industry has been spoiled beyond all corruption into being allowed to make low bar planned obsolescence changes to facilitate margin spreading on the middle and upper end.

[bridgman]

The 780 and up should be decently fast - low end gaming only, of course, but fast enough for everything else. The problem with most IGP products is that the graphics requirements are usually "the very best graphics possible for no more than a couple of dollars" ;(

We would probably sell a lot more 3450s if we didn't have the same graphics in a 780 :D

[psycho_driver]

More than nVidia ever did for us; Quit yer yappin'


I beg to differ. nVidia has consistantly provided quality binary drivers for many, many years. They also continue to update legacy drivers to ensure that users with old (oooold) hardware can use new software.

I cannot understand people who continually try to stand up for ATi when they really haven't done a whole lot for the linux community.

They're provided crappy binary drivers and they've released just enough documentation to make subpar open source drivers for their hardware that won't allow it to be used to anywhere near full potential.

I'm sure I come across as an nvidia fanboy on this site because I'm always singing their praises and knocking ATi. In truth I'm just a long-time linux user who has used a variety of cards from both brands (or tried to, in ATi's case). If I was a windows user I might very well advocate ATi cards.

I should also mention I completely gave up on ATi about a year ago. Maybe their drivers have improved since then. At that time, however, there was absolutely no, none, zero, zilch, comparison to be made between nVidia and ATi. Anyone advocating ATi over nVidia for linux gaming or multimedia should, quite honestly, be ashamed of themselves.

[bridgman]

...and they've released just enough documentation to make subpar open source drivers for their hardware that won't allow it to be used to anywhere near full potential.

I'm sorry, but that is just patently false. We have released enough technical information to let an equally sophisticated driver stack run 100% as fast as fglrx or the Windows driver (barring OS differences). The point is that writing an equally sophisticated 3D stack to match fglrx would require more developer effort than the entire Xorg community combined, and none of the developers I have spoken with feel that level of effort is necessary.

A clean, well-written driver of perhaps 1/10th the size and complexity of fglrx (say a straightforward Gallium3D driver, running over a decent memory manager and a carefully tweaked command submission backend) should be able to average 60-70% of fglrx performance across a broad range of apps, with 5-10% of the developer effort. That is what I expect will get implemented, but it's just a guess.

If you want to get 20 or 30 full time developers together for a couple of years and aim for 100% of fglrx performance, the programming information you need is available and we will cheerfully support your efforts. I'm not sure if it would be practical to start with Mesa+Gallium or if you would be better off starting from scratch, but we should know in the next six months.

I should also mention I completely gave up on ATi about a year ago. Maybe their drivers have improved since then. At that time, however, there was absolutely no, none, zero, zilch, comparison to be made between nVidia and ATi. Anyone advocating ATi over nVidia for linux gaming or multimedia should, quite honestly, be ashamed of themselves.

Yeah, that was about the time we started putting the first consumer-related improvements into the driver.

[etnlWings]

I posted this in the, "AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support", thread but I figure I'll cast a wide net and repost it here:

I don't use fglrx for my Radeon 9550 but I've found that I have to install it, if only briefly, to get any acceleration with any WINE-based products.

Once I've installed fglrx, I can then remove it and go back to the xorg-video-ati driver, retaining acceleration in WINE/Cedega but if I can't even install it, come Ubuntu 9.04, the usefulness of my PC is going to be severely hampered.

Anyone else experienced this bug and know a way around it that doesn't involve installing and uninstalling fglrx?

[bridgman]

This is interesting. Do you fully uninstall fglrx before switching back to the open driver, or do you think you are leaving one of the files that fglrx over-writes in place ?

Does the effect survive a reboot ? In other words, do we think this is from fglrx writing registers or changing files ?

[Wyatt]

I beg to differ. nVidia has consistantly provided quality binary drivers for many, many years.
Personally, I'm going to have to beg to differ too. The other way. fglrx has problems; I don't think anyone's going to deny that. To be sure, I had a devil of a time getting it working the first time. nvidia wins that one. But you know, I've had several orders of magnitude more issues with nvidia's terrible driver than ati's terrible driver.

It's one thing to install easily; it's an entirely different matter to be rock-stable for six months at a time. How often should I get an oops because my display driver inexplicably decided that it was a great time to deref NULL while I was taking a simple note in my text editor? It's never happened with fglrx. How often should an app start creating strange green corruptions all over the screen and then kernel oops? So much for "good legacy driver support." Why has performance in nvidia's driver been getting worse with this 6600 since the 180-series drivers hit? Why did it stop properly controlling the fan? Or the recent drivers that seemed to enjoy ignoring signals: I didn't even think drivers could cause that sort of problem! And don't even get me started on the ugly, ugly hack that is Twinview.

There may have been a time where your synopsis was correct. That time is no longer the present.

If we can't defend ATi and AMD for teaching us to fish, please don't defend nVidia for giving us a rotten cod. :)

[etnlWings]

This is interesting. Do you fully uninstall fglrx before switching back to the open driver, or do you think you are leaving one of the files that fglrx over-writes in place ?

Does the effect survive a reboot ? In other words, do we think this is from fglrx writing registers or changing files ?

I install fglrx, Catalyst and the one or two other packages fglrx demands as dependencies via apt and I apt-get purge them out of there. I also restore my pre-aticonf'd xorg.conf and have tried reinstalling the xorg-video-ati package just for the hell of it.

In the past I've usually left fglrx installed and in-use until something goes wrong (with 8.10 I think I left fglrx installed for about a month before I experimented with a dual-head setup and Catalyst refused to give me my native resolution back after I gave up on my dual-monitor aspirations).

So far I've found no other way to get WINE/Cedega/etc working properly (I use that term loosely) and I've found no way to re-break it, either. Going back to the open-source driver incurs a slight performance drop/few missing graphic operations but OpenGL/Direct3D in WINE retains the acceleration I'm unable to get on a fresh, pre-fglrx'ing install.