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KDE KWin May Drop Support For AMD Catalyst Drivers

Posted by Unknown on 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."

3 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. It's the right move, unfortuntately by haruchai · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  2. Teh sky, it's falling!!111 by joib · · Score: 5, Informative
    To recap, KWin currently supports:
    • No compositing
    • Compositing using the 2D XRender interface

    • Compositing using OpenGL 1.x

    • Compositing using OpenGL 2.x
    • Compositing using OpenGL ES 2 (code mostly shared with the OpenGL 2.x codepath)

    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!

  3. So what? by Tanktalus · · 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.