AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[MostAwesomeDude]

That is freedom of speech.

And we're officially Godwin'd. Grand.

Look, chill out. X.org is now responsible for your drivers. That's life. You can act like it's a big deal, but it's no different than with R200, or R100, or MGA, or Matrox, or 3DFX, or just about any other video card past end-of-life from the manufacturer's point of view.

Also, if you were really a proactive person, you would be reading the docs and figuring out how to write the code for the features of your video card that you so fervently desire, instead of spending your time ranting about your hypothetically exercisable online rights.

[hunterthomson]

I am quite chill.

Here I will quote myself...

"""
OK, Thankyou bridgman for all the help. I probaly never would have found all this out if it was not for you. I am now vary happy with my buy and am glad I didn't go with the Nvidia card. Now I'll know for sure if I have a problem with the catalyst driver it is realy a problem with something ells like configuration or a combo problem.
"""
and todays post that energyman got all upset about and said I would get in trouble for writing.

I will start by quoting the post I was repliying to...

yotambien...
"""
He's right, though. Time for the action. Enough of waiting for empty promises. I propose to nuke them. Or put salt in their coffe. Or something.

"""
Me...

"""
Ya, but on second thought. It mite be rather hard to overwhelm a CPU manufacturers servers. I'd think they have the best of the best of everything.

Eventhough I am not effected in a bad way, I do think that action "is" the only way to get attention. I am a proactive kind of guy. I also think that 2007 hardware is not old. I meen it is only 5/09 and I think computers should last at lest 3years. Also, a lot of times I get computers with last year hardware to save big $$ and I am sure this is common practice. If true, that would meen a lot of poeple that got computer's just last year are now left in the cold.

I am also vary happy that ATI has Open Source drivers. However, I don't think ATI should use them as some second horse to dump the work they don't feel like doing.
"""

As you can read, I was not even talking about that suff. Most of what I was saying was just that I think the cut off date should have been 3years like last time.

It may have seemed like I was ranting but it was just that it took a long time for energyman to realize it is ok for people to say one line of text that he may not agree with.

And to answer your question. I am learing how to program. I am learing Python right now. In January I am going to school to get an AS in CENT with Unix systems administration with Linux, TCP/IP with Linux, computer science with JAVA. I also take classes to get a CCNA.

[hunterthomson]

How about we all drop the sillyness and get back on topic.

What do you think about me saying 3 years is a better cut of date for driver suport?

or the more controversial

I am also vary happy that ATI has Open Source drivers. However, I don't think ATI should use them as some second horse to dump the work they don't feel like doing.

[bridgman]

Hunterthompson, I think the disconnect is that you're assuming we just walked away from 3xx-5xx support and left users totally dependent on the xorg/dri community. People are trying to tell you that is not the case, and that you may be jumping to conclusions a bit too quickly.

Community developers like MostAwesomeDude are doing great things to advance the open source drivers (MostAwesomeDude is working on the first Gallium3D implementation for ATI/AMD parts) but there has also been a lot of work on the open source drivers done by AMD-employed and AMD-funded developers as well, and that work is continuing today.

If you have a moment, it might be instructive to take a look at the commit logs for the drivers before reaching a final conclusion. Here's the open source "radeon" driver :

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/dri...video-ati/log/

Alex (agd5f) is, among other things, the maintainer of the "radeon" driver and for the last 15 months or so has worked for ATI/AMD, letting him spend more than just evenings and weekends on the open source drivers. We have two other developers working full time on the open source drivers as well, not counting the other technical folks involved in finalizing the programming documentation and helping with technical challenges, and also funded other open source driver work during 2007 and 2008.

Our contribution to the open source drivers is most obvious in the X driver (the link above), and most of the work in the 3D stack is currently being done by non-AMD developers as part of an overall rewrite of the entire framework for all GPU vendors, but implying that we just walked away from users may be missing the point.

[Kano]

oss drivers are really nice, but not NOW. the time is just not ready to replace fglrx. it looks like you put out specs, pay 2-3 dev and all is fine, that's definitely not working that way to keep up with other competitors.

[adamk]

oss drivers are really nice, but not NOW. the time is just not ready to replace fglrx. it looks like you put out specs, pay 2-3 dev and all is fine, that's definitely not working that way to keep up with other competitors.

But that doesn't change the fact that it's done. Can we all just deal with it and move on. Complaining about it here isn't going to change anything.

Adm

[Kano]

Well as ATI wants to provide new legacy win drivers for june, why not do a package for Linux too? I don't think that will be too hard.

[bridgman]

The Windows drivers will just contain bug and security fixes, no support for new OS bits. Like all legacy drivers, they will be built from a branch off the last mainline release (in this case the 9.3 Catalyst), not the ongoing mainline code. We could probably do a Linux build of that code but it would not contain any new X server, Xorg or Kernel support.

We didn't think that would be very useful, and felt that putting effort into the open source drivers instead would be a better use of time.

[Kano]

Well it would be more usefull than your other fglrx updates, as they are crap without 2.6.29+ support.

[hunterthomson]

I am glad to see this thead is back on topic.

Well, Ya your right that if your spending money on a copple Novel employees AMD/ATI is still doing work.
I am asumming that ATI has more money invested in and working on grafics cards made in 2008 and latter. So, while people who have a year and a half old grafics card may not be out in the cold they are camped out in the backyard. This is something Nvidia has not done nore ATI in the past. The last time you had a 3 year cut off date.

Although, I don't know all the facts. Maybe there was some big change form 2007 to 2008 so keeping suport for 3years was a realy big deal that would have ment there realy was no benifit to drop support for anything if they did that.