AMD Legacy Catalyst 13.1 for HD2000-4000 is out

[entropy]

xorg version <=12? The whole point of the updated driver is to add support for xorg up to version 13, so I think you're mistaken.

Says who?

The new legacy driver does not support xserver 1.13.

[LordSocky]

Entropy and Rigaldo seem to be correct, the driver does not work with X.org 13.1, at least as far as I can tell. This was basically a rush-fix to make Team Fortress 2 (and perhaps others? not sure) work as it threw an error with 12.6. AMD is really shooting themselves in the foot with this, right as Valve pushes Linux towards being viable for gaming. Leaving a really sour taste and definitely making me second-guess buying another AMD card when I build my new rig, and judging by the reactions across various forums, I'm not the only one.

[Kano]

Well basically it does what it should when you use Ubuntu LTS. Most likely you can use it on Kanotix Dragonfire as well soon when i finished my tests. Kanotix Dragonfire supports Steam unofficially as well...

[bridgman]

This was basically a rush-fix to make Team Fortress 2 (and perhaps others? not sure) work as it threw an error with 12.6. AMD is really shooting themselves in the foot with this, right as Valve pushes Linux towards being viable for gaming.

Maybe a dumb question, but how are we "shooting ourselves in the foot" by making Valve Linux gaming fixes a priority for the legacy release ?

Leaving a really sour taste and definitely making me second-guess buying another AMD card when I build my new rig, and judging by the reactions across various forums, I'm not the only one.

Definitely lots of unhappiness about not having the fixes, but your post suggests that prioritizing these fixes over (say) 1.13 X support was a Bad Thing. I'm not seeing that in the forums (other than this post, which is why I'm asking).

[dfoxpro]

Maybe a dumb question, but how are we "shooting ourselves in the foot" by making Valve Linux gaming fixes a priority for the legacy release ?

I notice with this new release lot of other games get some improvement for example 0AD hangs after 5 min with the old driver but with the new-one finally the IA pownded me ; the dolphin-emu (game cube) run with more FPS and less gliches for some more games (mario-(party~cart), soul calibur), ever games like torchlight and rochard (HB6) run with more fps.

BUT still we have a lot of problems, in my case, i can't use cairo-dock in mi amd machine because it freeze the PC (with an very old intel laptop it work very flawlessly), the video acceleration, blender clycles+amd...

[[Knuckles]]

Maybe a dumb question, but how are we "shooting ourselves in the foot" by making Valve Linux gaming fixes a priority for the legacy release ?

Definitely lots of unhappiness about not having the fixes, but your post suggests that prioritizing these fixes over (say) 1.13 X support was a Bad Thing. I'm not seeing that in the forums (other than this post, which is why I'm asking).

The release definitely was a great thing. I think people basically wish that at least HD 4xxx wasn't legacy, and so still got kernel and X support updates.

But while we probably won't get that, this release was definitely important. I had a friend trying to sell a HD 4850, which is miles ahead of my current nvidia (that on the other hand is still supported) and I said "thanks, but no thanks". With this release, I'm definitely tempted to see how performance compares between the two.

[bridgman]

Makes sense. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear "yes that was the most important thing but we want more". What surprised me was the implication that we had picked the wrong thing to prioritize.

We are continuing to work on improving the support for older hardware via the open source drivers, but it seemed to me that getting Steam/Valve fixes out was the most useful thing for the legacy Catalyst driver, particularly for owners of IGP-based systems (rs780/880) where performance is "only just" fast enough even with the Catalyst driver.

Thanks !

[LordSocky]

Makes sense. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear "yes that was the most important thing but we want more". What surprised me was the implication that we had picked the wrong thing to prioritize.

We are continuing to work on improving the support for older hardware via the open source drivers, but it seemed to me that getting Steam/Valve fixes out was the most useful thing for the legacy Catalyst driver, particularly for owners of IGP-based systems (rs780/880) where performance is "only just" fast enough even with the Catalyst driver.

Thanks !

Getting that fix out was definitely the most important thing, I'm not downplaying that. It's just that it took so long to happen and didn't bring hardly anything else as far as I know. It doesn't help that there was a massive misconception around the release regarding whether or not it actually supported 1.13. That part's not necessarily your fault, but the version number initially confused a lot of people, including myself. There's also a lot of anger around the issue that our hardware, which is only a few years old and some of which is still very much capable of handling modern titles, has been left behind, at least for now. I don't want to dislike AMD, because I have a pretty strong dislike of nVidia already and that pretty much removes both of my choices, but my current situation has made me secondguess what I put in my next box if it's just going to be relegated to the legacy bin in a couple of years and cause more headaches down the line.

[Goodolandy]

Got it working on my system. Had to re-do my system back to 12.04 LTS then kept looking at the error log to see what was coming back as missing. I eventually got all the required packages installed and created the Ubuntu installer.

Now TF2 is working, not that I'm a fan but was nice to see it work fairly well, I hope this means L4D2 will also work well once it is released.

[DanL]

Definitely lots of unhappiness about not having the fixes, but your post suggests that prioritizing these fixes over (say) 1.13 X support was a Bad Thing. I'm not seeing that in the forums (other than this post, which is why I'm asking).

New Xserver/kernel support for a legacy driver has never happened and no one ever said it would (correct me if I'm wrong), so isn't that debate academic at this point?