Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
https://support.ati.com/ics/support/def...894&task=knowledge&questionID=737-1176">Link.</a>
As of driver version 8.29.6 support for the following products is no longer included:
* Radeon® 8500/9000/9100/9200/9250
* Mobility? Radeon® 9000/9100/9200
* Radeon® IGP 9000/9100/9200
Users with these products should use driver version 8.28.8
If the drivers were open source there would be a much better chance that they would continue to support the older products. Instead plenty of customers will be unable to upgrade.
Luckily in this case there is limited 3d acceleration in the open drivers (or so drag's posts lead me to believe, I've never tried or looked into it), so ATI owners aren't totally screwed. But what happens when another company does this. Maybe for wireless or chipset drivers?
I use the ATI 9200 on my Ibook with R200 DRI drivers. Good 3d and 2d support. Most X.org developers seem to use these cards since they are well known. I think they'll eventually move to the Intel IGP stuff.
I also have a X800 PCIe ATI card which is a R400 generation card and I use the R300 DRI drivers to motivate that into 3d acceleration.
On the the same motherboard I have the X800 I was running the Intel GMA 950 IGP. 3d and 2d works out of the box for that.
The Intel IGP GMA x3000 should technically offer mid-range descrite card performance. It'll be on the Intel G965 motherboards. (there are low end versions for Q965 and such that don't have all the same features) It uses Tile based rendering to maximize the amount of bandwidth aviable from the shared memory stuff. 8 pipelines that are dynamicaly allocated for pixel, texture, shading. It also supports hardware acceleration vertex, shading, T&L, and antrostopic filtering. The current GMA cards do that stuff mostly on the host's CPU... The GPU core is 667mhz. This on paper puts the x3000 on par with Nvidia cards from 2 generations ago... (so it would be low/midrange cards of today) However reviews are not very good as it seems the GMA 950 outperforms it on Windows XP. This is blamed on poor beta drivers that don't take advantage of the hardware features. I haven't seen any benchmarks or whatnot with Linux, but the drivers are only realy aviable via CVS at this point.
As far as going into the future.. There is rumors that Intel is going back into the discrete video card market. Something like the GMA x3000, but with dedicated memory and more pipelines should offer some pretty decent performance. This would be nice for open source distro users as would be supported by X.org and all the platforms that use it.
And the future of ATI and AMD remains to be seen. Both AMD and Intel are making noises about integrating GPU features back into the CPU with future multicore designs and ATI has made a announcement that they are pursuing 'GPGPU' for "General Proccessing Graphic Proccessor Units" for scientific computing and clustering.
One would think that this would lead to open specs on how to use these GPUs since it doesn't realy make any sense to hide how to program for CPUs... but it doesn't realy make sense to hide how to program for video cards either. So what the f do I know?
Maybe in a few years we will all be back to doing software rendering just with multiple cpu cores that are just as fast at rendering that stuff as any video card. Which is nice since software rendering gives better results and is much more flexible. There are a lot of Open* stuff for graphics besides just OpenGL...
Screw propriatory drivers. I've sworn them off, too much of a PITA. Gave away my Nvidia card to my little brother.
