Felix Miata wrote:
On 2009/05/07 07:36 (GMT+0200) Roger Oberholtzer composed:
I wonder how far back Nvidia support goes? I recall a legacy driver that kept support for older cards at some level. Of course, that means that the cards were at least still supported at a level equivalent to when they were purchased. ATI, OTOH, simply dropped their 'older' cards altogether.
You guys seem to have a funny notion of the meaning of legacy support. Why should ATI provide proprietary driver support for old chips when the open source drivers get the job done?
Felix, I hear where you are coming from. The problem is what ATI is calling its "legacy" driver (the last driver with support for Rev. R500 and earlier cards was released *broken* for a large number of the older cards, ATI knew it was broken, and then decided to "wash their hands" of the problem leaving hundreds of thousands if not millions of unfortunate ATI customers -- screwed. That's where the actual disservice was done. As for the radeon/radeonhd driver -- it provides limited or no support whatsoever for many of the features of the cards in question. Troubled or no support for APCI on many cards, no compositing, no hdmi or support for integrated sound just to mention a few. I'm not knocking the radeon driver, the developers have done a damn good job with it given the black box they had to work with, but the point to be made here is that it is *not* a replacement for the fglrx driver as far a providing functionality for ATI cards needed to work with new desktops like kde4. As I've said before, if you have a desktop ATI card, then you have an easy option of replacing the card, but on the other hand, if you are stuck with a laptop, some purchased as recently as 2007, you are hosed :-( AS with all consumer betrayals, the backlash will usually motivate a solution in the not so distant future. I still truly believe that where ATI screwed itself was in failing to split the driver in September 08 when they tried to shoehorn Crossfire support and support for the 2000 and 3000 series cards and support for xorg 7.4 into a one size fits all binary driver. For lack of better words it looked like ATI simply "lost control" of its own code and for whatever reason could no longer add support for newer cards without breaking support for older cards. C'est la vi.... -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org