Ati dropping support for x1000 and older

"Beginning next month with the Catalyst 9.4 release, support for the R300/400/500 generations of graphics processors will be dropped from AMD's mainline ATI driver. In a move they hope will allow them to focus their efforts on newer and upcoming graphics processors, the mainline Catalyst driver on both Linux and Windows will stop supporting cards older than the Radeon HD 2000 series. Linux customers affected will be encouraged to use their open-source driver stack (xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd and Mesa) or stay with the Catalyst 9.3 driver."
more on:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r500_legacy&num=1

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looks like i'm a legacy user now

I read somewhere else that microsoft system users will still get a new driver once each four months, which seems reasonable. Benefiting newer technology is necessary for evolution and is fair to the folks that have cutting edge hardware.
But unfair to me. My hardware is still perfectly capable but might become obsolete just because ATI decided not to care at me anymore.

The open source driver is ok for some matters, but it doesn't have any acceptable 3D capatibilities so for me it doesn't work.

I just tried to install catalyst-old (note, not even the newer version) from AUR in arch and it told me my kernel >= 2.8 (and well it is, it is 2.9).
As i have read somewhere, kernel updates might cause conflicts with drivers that are not updated on pair with the kernel.
edit; here:
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Why_does_fglrx_not_work_for_my_kernel.3F

My point is: kernel will get updated, and by the time catalyst 9.3 starts having issued with newer kernels, i will have to either - a) purchase new hardware; b) to use the open source driver forcedly; c) stop updating my kernel.

What do you think on this and how other "legacy" users feel about this?

 

Roughly, when was the Radeon HD 2000 released ?

Is having support for older cards THAT muc of an effort for ATI ?

 

The R600 was released in 2007. Pretty much around the same time Nvidia released the 8xxx series.

 

OMG, they are dropping support for cards older than 2 years ? That is retarded There are many T42 laptops in common use which have the ATI radeon 7500 cards. What a boneheaded move, they are spitting on linux users.

I'll be sure to only buy laptops with Nvidia cards from now on

 

Relax: open source Radeon driver support anything older perfectly than the X000 series so that is already covered. And the Xxxx and X1xxx are also almost cmpletely supported, hell you can even actually watch video with Compiz enable In a sense it works better than ATI own driver.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver#Full 3D support (r100 and r200 series)

 

Well yeah, it works... I used xf86-video-ati for a while. For 2d daily web it is ok and flawless.

For 3d/opengl it it just plainly unusable. I run foobillards to test. Didn't measure the fps, but i would say it was probably around 10fps. Glxgears is ~300fps against ~1800 of fglrx. Some newer opengl examples just crashed.

 

Weird because Trigger worked flawlessy when I teste it on a X700, but then the x700 is quite a bit older than the x1600...

 

@OP: Don't bother upgrading the kernel if everything works fine...

 

Isnrt that a security risk ?

 

They're just not improving the drivers at all any more. They're dropping support for the older cards because they're a completely different architecture from the newer stream processor based GPU's. There will not be any improvements to the performance or functionality of the older cards from newer drivers, so why even support them? If you have an older card, you just have to use the older drivers. That's all there is to it. Or use the open-source drivers, which they are actually paying a couple of employees to work on.

Something is wrong with your configuration. I have an x1250 IGP on my desktop running the open-source ATI driver and I get ~350fps while Handbrake is running multiple threads and desktop effects are enabled. foobillard doesn't run very well with desktop effects enabled, but it still runs reasonably fast.

 

Maybe it is, but how often do kernel updates break functionality versus how often kernel updates fix security holes?

 

That's a good point on kernel upgrading. I will consider to avoid upgrading my kernel before having feedback about catalyst having issues on it or not.

I guess i'm pretty much with the standard configuration.
I don't have any experience with tweaking X or something. My xorg.conf was generated by aticonfig --initial.
The only thing that could be causing something would be me changing drivers everytime, but considering it always goes ok and i usually read documentation before doing it first time i would think there's nothing wrong with it aswell.

 

I haven't used the driver from AMD since Ubuntu Hardy, I run the opensource driver....works perfect, compiz in the Ubuntu LiveCD.
As of Jaunty, all of my hardware works in the LiveCD, even my Broadcom card

 

That's the problem. Using the open-source driver, aticonfig will set X to use fglrx. If you have fglrx installed, it's pretty difficult to get the open source driver to work. They have some incompatible libraries installed and such. You might try removing all fglrx packages and then reinstalling and reconfiguring the xorg package (shouldn't mess with any of your settings), especially if you're running Jaunty.

 

Wrong info - see below.

 

You also have problems with mesa and the OpenGL libraries. It's not just kernel level, and that takes more than just rebooting. It'll kill your GL performance in the open drivers because it'll fall back to software rendering instead of using the card because the fglrx libraries will be installed if fglrx is installed.

 

I forgot about that. Gentoo has eselect to make that easy, but how would that be switched in other distros?

 

Well, i'm not using the open source driver right now.

Anyway, I followed the documentation for changing the drivers and by that i got completely rid of the old driver and modules in rc.conf. Also i unloaded the modules before reinstalling. I also generated a new xorg.conf at each time i changed the drivers (using X or aticonfig).
I also changed the libgl when changing drivers because i read that fglrx uses its own libgl. And took off fglrx's libgl when putting open source back again.

I'm not on Jaunty, i run Arch.

I shall use fglrx for now as i need it to develop some applications (or as long as it is supported ).


Thanks for caring, anyway