AMD's Legacy Driver Will Not Support X Server 1.6

[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=Kjella;65441]

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.