AMD To Drop Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Catalyst Support

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Originally Posted by Hirager

KDE's Oxygen handles high DPI impressively well. I have a 135 PPI (pixels per inch) netbook. It's only problem regarding the pixel destiny is Firefox's policy of forced 96 PPI, which makes web browsing a difficult task.

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Hmm, well, I was thinking about XFCE there. Although on KDE, I don't seem to have any option other than 96 or 120 DPI, and that only for fonts, it doesn't seem to affect images... :\

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Originally Posted by Kivada

I don't care about the blob for either company and I care even less about Wine, PlayOnLinux, Crossover or Cedega compatibility.

Try the PC only titles not the console ports like Mass Effect 3, if you max the graphics settings on titles like Metro2033, Aliens VS Predator, Hard Reset, Just Cause 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dirt 3, Crysis: Warhead, Mafia 2, Batman Arkam City, Total War: Shogun 2, STALKER: Call of Pripyat and the list goes on for Windows games that when maxed out on detail settings will barely break a 30 FPS average let alone the 60FPS the high end gamers demand on 1920x1080~2560x1600 no AA~4x AA if that on an HD4890, the guys playing these games refuse to compromise by lowering settings, hence why they are always buying the best they can get their hands on, some have 3-4 top end cards pushing a single monitor...

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Exactly my point... This thread is about AMD dropping support for the binary blob, there is nothing about the OSS drivers here.

I wonder what you mean by maxed out settings... I could choke my card with ME3 if I forced 8x supersampling, no problem. The thing is that there is no need to, it looks fine as it is. So once again, while it's true that there are people who are upgrading like that, but it's the enthusiast market.

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Originally Posted by GreatEmerald

Hmm, well, I was thinking about XFCE there. Although on KDE, I don't seem to have any option other than 96 or 120 DPI, and that only for fonts, it doesn't seem to affect images... :\

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I forgot already. The feature to set custom PPI came in KDE 4.8 . However, the PPI could be also enforced by modifying some config files, but that is so painful, that I erased it from my memory. I said KDE handles PPI scaling well because of reason. I saw the result of PPI scaling on Windows. It was so terrible, that probably my scale of judgement was altered. On the other even Macs don't have complete PPI scaling system, even if theirs the best now.

Its a piece of cake to force a different dpi setting without kde 4.8. This is for kdm:

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DPI=100
perl -pi -e "s|(ServerArgsLocal=-br -nolisten tcp).*|\1 -dpi $DPI|" /etc/kde4/kdm/kdmrc

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A similar setting is possible for any other dm. That works even before you login.

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Originally Posted by GreatEmerald

Exactly my point... This thread is about AMD dropping support for the binary blob, there is nothing about the OSS drivers here.

I wonder what you mean by maxed out settings... I could choke my card with ME3 if I forced 8x supersampling, no problem. The thing is that there is no need to, it looks fine as it is. So once again, while it's true that there are people who are upgrading like that, but it's the enthusiast market.

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Apparently you have terrible reading comprehension because this has everything to do with the OSS drivers.

As well as you really should go look at the reviews of the current GPU hardware out there on WINDOWS REVIEW SITES, where they actually test the hardware on the most demanding titles on the market, because I noted that in some reviews cards like the HD7970 and GTX680 which are somewhere around 4x the performance of your HD4890 can't break 60FPS on them at 1920x1080 even without Anti-Assailing.

Your card WAS high end, in 2009, 4 generations ago(HD5870, HD6870, HD6970, HD7970), now it's lower midrange for the Windows market as the 2009, the HD5770/HD6770/HD6790 are just as fast as the HD4870 and HD4890 as it was just a voltage tweaked and overclocked HD4870.

You really should expand your information beyond Phoronix, Larabels "tests" prove nothing about what current GPU hardware can do.

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Originally Posted by Kivada

Apparently you have terrible reading comprehension because this has everything to do with the OSS drivers.

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These news affect only users of the AMD blob driver. People who use the blob driver are using it for some reason. That reason most definitely doesn't include supporting the OSS driver, as they would be using the OSS driver in that case.

The announcement I read states that 12.7 will probably be the last mainline catalyst release supporting these chipsets, and support of these chipsets will move to a new branch. And there will be at least bugfix releases for that branch.
If That includes bumping the supported kernel and xserver is beyond my knowled

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Originally Posted by Saist

Not really sure why it would be controversial. The last 4x00 series card released was over 3 years ago in February 2009. Anybody who was running these for OpenGL performance reasons has probably upgraded by now.

As far as driver support goes, the Open-Source driver support is pretty solid. I've been running on a Radeon 4650 GPU on the X.org driver for several months now and really haven't missed anything that would be in Catalyst. Sure, I can't really run Unigine on the driver, but, come on, again, if I was any sort of gamer, I wouldn't be using cards from 3 years ago that lacked OpenGL 4.x support.

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I've got a notebook with a 4650M which I bought like 2-3 years ago (when AMD had the best mobile GPUs). Runs most DX9.0c games reasonably well via wine. The FOSS AMD GPU driver sends the notebook into thermal meltdown (despite my best efforts on ARCH to sort this out) and has significantly lower 3D performance.

If I was running a desktop GPU it's no biggie... But you saying I've got to buy a whole new notebook now? I wouldn't mind so much if AMD at least sorted out the FOSS kernel driver power management issues...

I can't get video acceleration to work period (with either FOSS or proprietary driver)... So that (UVD) is not such a big issue :rolleyes:

Bob :mad:

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Originally Posted by bobwya

I've got a notebook with a 4650M which I bought like 2-3 years ago (when AMD had the best mobile GPUs). Runs most DX9.0c games reasonably well via wine. The FOSS AMD GPU driver sends the notebook into thermal meltdown (despite my best efforts on ARCH to sort this out) and has significantly lower 3D performance.

If I was running a desktop GPU it's no biggie... But you saying I've got to buy a whole new notebook now? I wouldn't mind so much if AMD at least sorted out the FOSS kernel driver power management issues...

I can't get video acceleration to work period (with either FOSS or proprietary driver)... So that (UVD) is not such a big issue :rolleyes:

Bob :mad:

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You use Arch, right? If so, then: http://www.archlinux.org/packages/co..._64/linux-lts/. Half of solution done.

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Originally Posted by bobwya

But you saying I've got to buy a whole new notebook now?

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Stop being so melodramatic, you know damn well you can just sit on a distro that will support 12.7 for another 3-5 YEARS, by which point, because you game, you'll probably own a new laptop anyways.

This is the current situation on my laptop (HP 615, AMD 780GM/HD3200, Slackware -current):
Support with fglrx is fine, even if I had to patch the 12.3 to run with my kernel.
When I switch to the radeon drivers I have sloppy 2D (even fast scrolling in a browser will stutter), high CPU usage and 15°C higher CPU temperatures.
I don't care about performance, this laptop is not meant for gaming. But if they don't fix the power consumption issues before dropping support in fglrx my laptop will basically become useless for mobile use. This laptop is a little older than two years and running fine for it's intended use. I don't want to replace it now.
Also, common I should change the distro to be supported for more than a few months? Running Ubuntu? If I want a buggy system I can change to MS. Going to CentOS or Debian? Running the same software for years, without getting the chance of new features or, in the case of Debian, even bugfixes? Nope.
When the support ends for my system and AMD has not fixed the power issues on systems like mine I will not recommend AMD anymore, and I regret buying a HD6870 a few months before if this will be the case. Can I expect that support for this card ends in 2014? Probably also without having real support from the OSS drivers?

Thanks, but no, AMD.