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KDE KWin May Drop Support For AMD Catalyst Drivers
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."
Six years is a long time in the graphics world and AMD / ATI have had plenty of time to fix their broken stuff.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Wont this result in Linux losing out on the "old PC" use case?
6 year old PC's can still run XP, and once XP support is withdrawn, they will have to either sell off those PC's or move to Linux
By withdrawing support for old PC's, they are losing out on a decent amount of the already tiny marketshare Linux has in the PC market
I remember when they first started out. Their gui-system would replace windows, but better. With less bloath and more freedom for users. Those days are long gone. I do hope the guys at kde understand that this will mean a new (and probably) big lost of users. AMD should get their drivers straightened out, but I can't help but have the feeling this will bite KDE in the butt and not AMD. Still a shame those gui's became so bloathed and slooowwww. And thank God for fluxbox and the likes.
Compositing using OpenGL 1.x
So what is suggested here is to delete support for compositing using OpenGL 1.x.
Personally, I can hardly blame the developer for wanting to prune that list a bit.
And, if you don't want to see this feature deleted, now is your opportunity to step up to the plate and contribute!
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.
I haven't heavily used Linux since I was in highschool. What's up with the graphics situation on it? I always hear/see problems with it, and I find it confusing because it's such a fundamental thing
I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Accelerated 3D on Linux is hit-and-miss. Therefore, people don't often use it for things that require that. Therefore, there isn't that much of an incentive to improve things.
On the other hand, both nVidia and Intel actually support Linux, and have done so for years. AMD and Via have paid lip service for years, but their drivers don't work very well in practice. Then there are the drivers developed by the community, which tend to lack features and performance for newer hardware. The gap in features and performance is closing, but the definition of "newer hardware" keeps shifting so that, pretty, much you will get severely degraded performance compared to the state of the art, either because the drivers aren't fast, or because the hardware isn't fast. There seem to simply not be enough knowledgeable hackers to make the community drivers keep up with developments in hardware land.
From my perspective, part of the problem is that everything is a moving target. Graphics hardware is a moving target, because the hardware interface changes in incompatible ways. OpenGL is a moving target, both the core and the extensions. Linux is a moving target. And on top of that, the *AA are trying to stuff in Digital Restrictions Management, too.
I think if you look at the history of graphics on Linux, things come in waves. At some point, there used to be good support for common SVGA cards. Then there was an explosion of new graphics hardware, and Linux couldn't keep up. There wasn't even a VESA driver, which would have worked on all of them. Then, the graphics card market consolidated, and things became better. 2D would pretty much work. Xv would often work, too. 3D became the next battle. nVidia quickly decided to conquer the Linux and FreeBSD market, and have dominated pretty much since that time. But their drivers aren't open source. Intel decided some years ago to fill that gap. Their hardware wasn't all that fast, but is getting better all the time. ATI has gone back and forth; at some point, their cards were preferred, because the specs were available and there were good open source drivers. Alas, since the R600 / HD2000 or so, the hardware interface is different, and the open source drivers haven't caught up. ATI's closed source drivers have always been pretty bad. They're fast if they work, but usually have problems.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
While the graphics situation on Windows is far better, it has actually slid back a bit from the user's (or at least the gamer's) point of view over the last 12 months or so.
I went for years with XP and Vista machines, never having to think about graphics drivers. I'd stick the latest set on when I bought the machine, and then they'd "just work" until I was ready for a new machine. But recently, there's been a real trend towards graphics drivers optimised towards particular games - which may give performance or even stability issues in other games. Suddenly, as a PC gamer, I'm back in the situation I was last in back around 2002 or so, of actually having to think and care about graphics drivers.
Not a positive development - and one which is seemingly being driven by ego-fuelled feuds between a few specific developers.
The problem comes in with the fact that the open source drivers don't support everything. I seem to be in a real minority -- I really use Linux for all my desktop stuff, except playing the odd game. All my music, movies, everything I do from my linux laptop generally. The open source drivers won't allow me to do all the stuff that I do -- mainly, I won't be able to watch high def movies -- no hardware decoding support. There probably never will be either, without using catalyst. Do not also forget that since I'm on a laptop, I've got concerns regarding my power usage too on occasion, and the open source drivers consume a lot more juice. So the open source drivers *I would much rather use otherwise* don't support all the features that I use frequently. So this is bad for me, at least. My laptop isn't old, either -- its video card is a Mobility Radeon 5870, still pretty spiffy if you ask me.
Also, the desktop effects do more than just look pretty, a number of handy features for organizing windows and seeing what apps you have running require it.
So yeah, I just can't see this making AMD finally bring their drivers into the last century. Speaking as a Militant Linux Zealot who aggressively hates and seeks the destruction of everyone who doesn't wholly agree with me -- The linux desktop numbers are fairly low, I personally think they are higher than most people think -- but thats still a low number. Then cut that into a third or so which is the KDE desktop people. Thats one third of a small number ... I doubt AMD gives a shit. I see what the developer is saying here, but it seems that his choices are 1) Irritate a lot of users who use AMD graphics, probably lose a number of them who use the catalyst features, 2) Continue to support code for the sake of AMD being kind of a shit company.
I'd rather not get screwed by this, so I hope he continues to support GL1 for now, and maybe we can find another way to push AMD into updating their drivers because I don't think he'll get the response from them that he thinks he will.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."