AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver

[Qaridarium]

Does this affect the x1300 card?

yes but not in the next 3 monds!

and you will get a nice opensource driver

[dkasak]

I actually find this pretty funny. I have to say "I told you so" ( though I'm too lazy to find a link, I predicated EXACTLY this when people started reporting that r300 support was broken ).

I just bought a laptop with an integrated r600 chip. So for the past couple of months, I've been using fglrx so I can use ecomorph ( port of compiz to run on enlightenment ). If only r600+ chips will be supported, then I must say that fglrx can only be considered 'alpha' quality, because my experience with fglrx on r600 has been pretty poor indeed. 2D rendering is glacial - I assume there is no 2D acceleration at all - the RadeonHD driver is *way* ahead in this regard. I've seen benchmarks on Phoronix that claim the opposite, and I find that completely contrary to reality. 3D acceleration is reasonable ( I don't play games, but compiz / ecomorph seems to work ... mostly ), but quite unstable. I get regular 5-second+ pauses where the system appears to lock, and then magically revive itself. I get rendering glitches, flashing trangles, etc. The itask-ng launcher / dock thing in E17 doesn't render *anything* with fglrx other than the text pop-up with the application name ... ie no icon or bar or anything. I get a kernel oops when restarting X, followed very quickly by a hard lockup. Ouch! And AMD claim this as 'supported', eh? God knows what shape r700 support is in ...

An interesting question is what AMD has to say for people who bought laptops with a <600 chip. Sure there's the open-source driver, which they very recently released docs for, but there are important pieces missing. My old laptop, for example, recently suffered catastrohpic failure which I'm starting to think was an overheating issue in the 3D chip. There's very little power/thermal management stuff in the open-source drivers. It's easy to tell PC owners to pull out a wad of cash and buy the latest video card, but it's not quite that simple for laptop owners. Not that it affects me personally, but I would hardly call this deprecation and the resulting user experience 'graceful'. It also begs the question: when will the current alpha-quality r600 support be deprecated? When the r800 is released? I know ... I know ... fglrx is not for linux desktop users ... it's for graphics workstation users. The point is that you don't pull the rug out from under NEW customers until there is a smooth transition to the open-source drivers. Well I wouldn't anyway.

Anyway, I've already switched to 2D-only RadeonHD, as I'm sick of seeing messages in my kernel output about replaying resierfs transactions. Since doing that, my bitterness has given way to amusement at watching the current sitation unfold.

[energyman]

easy: people with old hardware have a wide range of distributions with several years of support to choose from. ubuntu lts, rhel, centos, sles, sled.

[Qaridarium]

easy: people with old hardware have a wide range of distributions with several years of support to choose from. ubuntu lts, rhel, centos, sles, sled.

Debian to kann nicht jemand mal ein skript schreiben wo leute die devplatformen einsetzen wie fedora und den fglrx nutzen einfach ausgeblendet werden ? würde man sich viel mühe sparen!

[Nille]

Debian to kann nicht jemand mal ein skript schreiben wo leute die devplatformen einsetzen wie fedora und den fglrx nutzen einfach ausgeblendet werden ? würde man sich viel mühe sparen!

or a script to remove all non English Post in an English forum It is not nice to Speak in a English forum German.

[Qaridarium]

or a script to remove all non English Post in an English forum It is not nice to Speak in a English forum German.

yes but the german part only was bullshit.. sorry .. offtropic...

only for energyman!

you can call questions to brigeman here·.. like this "will amd bring more opengl code to the opensource driver in the future ?" ..

and he say "yes yes.. much more"

[bridgman]

I actually find this pretty funny. I have to say "I told you so" ( though I'm too lazy to find a link, I predicated EXACTLY this when people started reporting that r300 support was broken ).

I believe you, but actually the two were completely unrelated. I'm told the missing R300 IDs were added back in recently.

I just bought a laptop with an integrated r600 chip. So for the past couple of months, I've been using fglrx so I can use ecomorph ( port of compiz to run on enlightenment ). If only r600+ chips will be supported, then I must say that fglrx can only be considered 'alpha' quality, because my experience with fglrx on r600 has been pretty poor indeed. 2D rendering is glacial - I assume there is no 2D acceleration at all - the RadeonHD driver is *way* ahead in this regard. I've seen benchmarks on Phoronix that claim the opposite, and I find that completely contrary to reality.

Ecomorph is marked "experimental, does not work on many graphics cards". Could I ask you to try a supported distro and window manager first, then identify issues specific to enlightenment and ecomorph separately ?

Regarding 2D performance, I think you're talking about "features" more than "quality". My understanding is that the supported acceleration APIs (XAA, OpenGL( run really fast (which is what the Phoronix articles talk about) but some programs require EXA or equivalent acceleration to avoid SW fallbacks (which is where "glacial" comes in). What I think you're seeing there is the lack of EXA acceleration (which only recently became useful in the X stack), not a quality issue.

3D acceleration is reasonable ( I don't play games, but compiz / ecomorph seems to work ... mostly ), but quite unstable. I get regular 5-second+ pauses where the system appears to lock, and then magically revive itself. I get rendering glitches, flashing trangles, etc. The itask-ng launcher / dock thing in E17 doesn't render *anything* with fglrx other than the text pop-up with the application name ... ie no icon or bar or anything. I get a kernel oops when restarting X, followed very quickly by a hard lockup. Ouch! And AMD claim this as 'supported', eh? God knows what shape r700 support is in ...

Which driver version are you using ? The only pauses I have heard about so far were related to PAT kernel vs driver settings a couple of months ago. This may be something specific to the distro/wm you are using, not sure. Are you running elive or something else ?

An interesting question is what AMD has to say for people who bought laptops with a <600 chip. Sure there's the open-source driver, which they very recently released docs for, but there are important pieces missing.

We released the docs in Feb 08, over a year ago, right ? I was there

What do you think is missing ? Devs are already working on power management code for 5xx in the open drivers using the existing information. It's power management for 6xx and higher which still needs documentation.

My old laptop, for example, recently suffered catastrohpic failure which I'm starting to think was an overheating issue in the 3D chip.

It's unlikely, unless the laptop was not designed for continuous use. I obviously don't know your specific situation but the most common problems seem to relate to reduced airflow inside the laptop, either from internal dust buildup or fan failure. My last laptop died when the fan siezed up.

The open source drivers don't reduce power at idle yet, but the result is the same as, say, gaming rather than light usage.

There's very little power/thermal management stuff in the open-source drivers. It's easy to tell PC owners to pull out a wad of cash and buy the latest video card, but it's not quite that simple for laptop owners. Not that it affects me personally, but I would hardly call this deprecation and the resulting user experience 'graceful'. It also begs the question: when will the current alpha-quality r600 support be deprecated? When the r800 is released? I know ... I know ... fglrx is not for linux desktop users ... it's for graphics workstation users. The point is that you don't pull the rug out from under NEW customers until there is a smooth transition to the open-source drivers. Well I wouldn't anyway.

I guess I'm still confused why everyone is using the state of the open drivers *today* to judge a decision which will first affect you four or five months from now. We are moving 5xx to a legacy support level, and I think most people understand that. Let's say we move to a quarterly release schedule; the first fglrx release under that schedule would be June/July.

We're not saying that the open source drivers can replace fglrx today. We're saying that we believe the open source drivers will be a viable alternative in the timeframe when the first legacy fglrx update would come out (first fglrx update on a quarterly cycle would be four months from now). Make sense ?

Anyway, I've already switched to 2D-only RadeonHD, as I'm sick of seeing messages in my kernel output about replaying resierfs transactions. Since doing that, my bitterness has given way to amusement at watching the current sitation unfold.

I'm sorry, what do reiserfs transactions have to do with fglrx ?

[smitty3268]

I guess I'm still confused why everyone is using the state of the open drivers *today* to judge a decision which will first affect you four or five months from now. We are moving 5xx to a legacy support level, and I think most people understand that. Let's say we move to a quarterly release schedule; the first fglrx release under that schedule would be June/July. The question is whether the open drivers will be a viable alternative to fglrx for most users STARTING FOUR MONTHS FROM NOW, not today.

Well, we've been told that fglrx r500 and below will never support XServer 1.6, and there are already distros out there that have moved to it. Not ones that AMD supports of course. But it's not long until the next Ubuntu release either. So I think it's perfectly fair to compare the drivers right now. If everyone here was running an enterprise distro you might have a better point.

[bridgman]

Sure, but even if we kept updating fglrx on a legacy support schedule (say quarterly) then you wouldn't get 1.6 support until June-ish anyways. If you're comparing open source drivers to fglrx *not* moving to a legacy support model for older GPUs then I agree the outcome would be different.

[TheK]

Sure, but even if we kept updating fglrx on a legacy support schedule (say quarterly) then you wouldn't get 1.6 support until June-ish anyways.

I would be happy to get at least one for the Radeon HD chips some time soon - and "soon" does mean early enough to see them put into Ubuntu 9.04 and tested there before the release; so "some when in mid April" is no real option.

Oh, and you'd only need to do _two_ legacy releases each year: each time there's a new X-Server (the next is afaik expected in September).