KDE KWin May Drop Support For AMD Catalyst Drivers

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday February 22, 2012 @04:12AM from the my-radeon-9100-is-displeased dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The KWin window manager maintainer for KDE is looking at removing the legacy OpenGL 1.0 renderer from the KWin code-base due to the costs of supporting legacy hardware. This means dropping support for non-GL2+ graphics cards, which are all over six years old, but in the process would mean that for now there is no longer any support for the AMD Catalyst driver on the KDE desktop. Due to driver bugs, AMD's proprietary Catalyst software only works well with the GL1 renderer even though their latest hardware supports OpenGL 4."

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So what? by Tanktalus · 2012-02-22 04:37 · Score: 5, Interesting

I had more than my share of problems with the Catalyst driver. Switched to the radeonhd driver in its infancy, and got better results, albeit more crashes. It quickly matured. Later I switched to the radeon driver, once it had reasonably mature support for my HD3870 or whatever it is. The performance is great, the stability is great, and I expect that compositing will continue to work.
Basically, AMD has helped the open-source community to develop this driver sufficiently for it to take over as far as I'm concerned.