AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[d2kx]

We have two other developers working full time on the open source drivers as well

I don't want to offend anyone, but seriously I have not seen any real commits from Matthias Hopf and Egbert Eich in about a year or so. Alex Deucher (and Dave Airlie, Corbin Simpson) however are on fire

[bridgman]

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.

I don't want to offend anyone, but seriously I have not seen any real commits from Matthias Hopf and Egbert Eich in about a year or so. Alex Deucher (and Dave Airlie, Corbin Simpson) however are on fire

Alex, Richard and Cooper all work for AMD and work full time on the open source drivers. Cooper joined the open source effort recently, replacing another AMD employee who moved to the fglrx team. Richard is working on 6xx/7xx 3d support right now, while Alex and Cooper both work with older GPUs as well.

Matthias, Egbert and Luc played a key role in kicking off the open source graphics initiative as part of the long-standing partnership between AMD and Novell, and Matthias continued to work on the initial 6xx/7xx 3d engine documentation and support.

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.

The big change (in 2006, really) was moving from the R3xx-based architecture (used for 3xx-5xx) to the unified shader architecture used for 6xx and higher. We kept the 3xx-5xx code base going much longer than normal, supporting 7 year old GPUs in our mainline driver in order to keep the code required for 5xx active and supported.

Nearly all of the R5xx GPUs were introduced in 2005, although there were some new board designs in 2006 to take advantage of newly available memory chips. I believe the X1950 Pro was the last new chip in the 5xx family, launched in Oct 2006.

The R600, RV610 and RV630 launched in May 2007.

[Kano]

It is hard to buy legacy called Nvidia hardware (something that does not work with 185.xx), but there are LOTS of laptops and other systems out there which are still sold as new. Why on earth do you call it legacy?

[bridgman]

It is hard to buy legacy called Nvidia hardware (something that does not work with 185.xx), but there are LOTS of laptops and other systems out there which are still sold as new. Why on earth do you call it legacy?

That's a good question. Products stay in the channel for years; last time I was in a big US box store (in late 2008) I saw Rage 128 and RageXL cards being sold as new, along with similarly old products from most of our competitors. In fairness, I'm sure that they were "new" in the sense of "not used", but "new" like "free" can have multiple meanings.

In general the word "legacy" is used to indicate how the product is being treated, ie the consequence of a vendor decision, rather than being a definition which products fall into over time. There isn't really a sharp cut-off where products disappear from the market and become "legacy", unfortunately, they just gradually fade away over perhaps 10 years.

Put simply, products become "legacy" when the vendors say they are legacy. I know that's not a wholly satisfying answer, but it's the best one I have found. Since no vendor can control how long their products stay in the marketplace, we all try to adopt an EOL strategy which steps down the level of support over time rather than cutting it off sharply. In this case we are moving the support focus from the fglrx driver to the open source drivers, but continuing to contribute resources to the support effort.

[hunterthomson]

Well, Now I cry for real.

The opensource drivers can't even play a video.
The catalyst drivers crash Archlinux and Ubuntu.
All I get is a black screen.

I will pay someone to help me. How about $30+$10hr to sucessfuly help me get the catalyst driver to work.
I can put it in your paypall account.

Edit: Ok well I can wach video's with what ever driver Ubuntu used by default.. I think the opensource one. Not the end of the world like I thought.... I'll still pay to play games though.

[Kano]

I guess buying a new Nvidia card is cheaper

For U you can try this

wget -N http://kanotix.com/files/install-fglrx-debian.sh
sudo -i
rm -f /etc/X11/xorg.conf*
dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

then press ctrl-alt-f1, login as normal user, then:

sudo sh install-fglrx-debian.sh

In several cases fglrx drivers lockup the system, in that case you can hack your system like:

for x in kdm gdm xdm wdm; do
if [ -x /etc/init.d/$x ]; then
sudo update-rc.d -f $x remove
sudo update-rc.d $x start 99 5 . stop 01 0 1 2 3 4 6 .
fi
done

then you can boot with 2 or 3 or 4 as extra option and then the system does not start X. There is another option for Ubuntu usually, but that will disable the startup of X inside gdm, that means if you want to start X then you would have to modify /etc/init.d/gdm - take a look if you want. After that run the mentioned script from above, thats the cleanest way to install fglrx.

[hunterthomson]

Just to clean up. I got it working. I found a guy that had the same laptop and he gave me his xorg.conf. He also knew how to fix the problem. All I had to do was>>>

sudo aticonfig --acpi-services=off

I even got it to work in Archlinux
I realy don't like Ubuntu.... It is so easy it is a pain in the ***.

I must say now that I have tried the open source drivers. WOW they suck! glxgears was getting 350FPS, My intel x3100 gets 680GPS. They are not even useable yet. Vesa is almost better. I can't believe ATI can say. "Well they can just use the open source drivers. Sure they don't support all the new suff but they still work."

With that said, when the Open Source drivers are useable. I would take a small performance hit just to say I use no proprietary drivers.

[krazy]

glxgears was getting 350FPS, My intel x3100 gets 680GPS. They are not even useable yet. Vesa is almost better.

http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Glx...ot_a_Benchmark

[deanjo]

http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Glx...ot_a_Benchmark

I really wish everytime someone tried to use glxgears as a benchmark they would get an electric shock.

[hunterthomson]

I really wish everytime someone tried to use glxgears as a benchmark they would get an electric shock.

Ya i know I was thinking I sould put a disclamer in there.
I am also see why it is bad. I am now finding this dirver is still not working all that well. I guess I just need to set up my xorg.conf better or something. It frezes for like 4-5 secs when I change desktop or open a new window like firefox or terminator. But nexuiz is getting 200FPS too. So, I guess a few more days and maybe it will work right. Anyway, come on if it only get's 300FPS in glxgears it dose show how crappy they are....