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AMD's 22-year-old GPUs still getting driver updates thanks to the FOSS community
- neogodless 3y agoRecent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38868265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38868265 (freedesktop.org) 100 comments 2 days ago
- dang 3y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: AMD's 22 year old GPUs are still getting updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38868265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38868265 - Jan 2024 (101 comments)
- RedShift1 3y agoThe GPU featured an AGP interface (an ancient competitor to PCIe) Well that just made me feel ancient :')
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoWas it a competitor? I thought it was obsoleted by PCIE?
- ksec 3y agoI dont think it was ever a competitor. At least that was not how I remembered it because every one knew PCI-E will take over, especially when Intel is behind both technology.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lhl 3y agoYes, I think "predecessor" is a more apt term than competitor. AGP was introduced in 1997 and was pretty ubiquitous for almost a decade. While the first PCIe graphics cards started coming out around 2004, AGP cards continued to be released for several years later until they were phased out completely.
- helf 3y ago[dead]
- snvzz 3y agoImagine having used PCI video cards. And VLB. And ISA before that.
- andrewstuart 3y agoQuestion: what's the difference between "community supported drivers" and exploitation of the valuable time of highly expert computer programmers? Nvidia keeps its drivers actively supported for what feels like a very long time. Nvidia is doing the work, the QA, dedicating the full time resources to this expensive, extremely time consuming, highly skilled, complex, mission critical, professional level, important task. I can easily see how AMD might just happily drop driver support quickly now and say "Oh that's the communities job". I remember for a long time after Amazon Web Services was launched it provided official drivers only for Java and kept praising and thanking its dedicated community members for implementing AWS features into open source libraries for Python 2 or PHP or whatever. It was an absolutely shithouse outcome. AWS would constantly launch new features and there was no way to use them because they were not implemented in your library because the guy who did it out of hours was away at a picnic or whatever. In the case of Python it took years and years and years before Amazon actually started taking responsibility for its own drivers, writing them, documenting them, QAing them and updating them with new features when the cloud launched new features - an absolutely massive task. AMD should not rely on the community and should compete with Nvidia in duration and quality and feature of its drivers. Dare I say it, open source support for AMD might actually be a bad thing for this reason - it will make AMD lazy.
- Dalewyn 3y ago>it will make AMD lazy. AMD is lazy, or more to the point AMD can't software at all.
- andrewstuart 3y agoThen I have to say, open source AMD drivers is a double edged sword. If AMD thinks being open source means it can just give up its software efforts in favor of "the community" - i.e. people volunteering personal time here and there..... then that's a bad outcome. It's probably better to have closed source drivers that are fully the responsibility of AMD for better or for worse.
- snvzz 3y ago
- geerlingguy 3y agoWe're also trying to preserve the utility of older cards by getting at least portions of the drivers working on alternate platforms (like arm64), so they can be repurposed for Plex/Jellyfin transcoding, retro gaming, GPU compute, etc.: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/issues/564 https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss...
- 29athrowaway 3y agoThe ATI Radeon 9700 Pro was one of the most liked GPUs of its time. Google "radeon 9700 site:slashdot.org"
- jemmyw 3y ago> The GPU featured an AGP interface (an ancient competitor to PCIe) Man that makes me feel old. AGP was the new thing the last time I built a PC before switching to laptops. 22 years doesn't seem to warrant the word ancient.