Their is always gonna be support for older hardware via OpenGL. The article in question is talking about Vulkan drivers and that is a whole different API. Current Vulkan API based drivers only support amdgpu which is GCN 1.2 and up. GCN 1.0 and 1.1 will be supported only if a devs makes it backwards compatable.

All CGN cards are still supported in some form, pre-GCN cards are no longer. (Not even for OpenGL, because drivers won't work with newer kernel/xorg versions.)

AMD will be slowing down support for Catalyst though, I can prophet that. It makes sense- their drivers are pretty much being beaten by the open-source drivers. Part of the reason why they copied and pasted 93k lines of code in a push request. They might as well just take what they have and merge it with open-source drivers. AMD will just have to push their newer upcoming graphics cards with AMDGPU drivers and hope for the best of it.

The real question is will previous gen hardware benefit from it. Some games like serious same 3 run really bad on the open drivers.

Originally posted by DIRT:

The real question is will previous gen hardware benefit from it. Some games like serious same 3 run really bad on the open drivers.

Anything below GCN 1.0 will not be supported thru AMDGPU from what the sounds of it on Phoronix Forums. Other older GPU's will be supported via radeon/radeonsi drivers. As far as feature support things are nearing FGLRX quality, to find out what is supported by your GPU you can go to: https://wiki.freedesktop.org/xorg/RadeonFeature/

When stuff is more feature supported then I can see them making games run better and FGLRX is pretty much dead unless you need workstation software support. As far as Serious Sam 3 i get better performance on the open source driver with a hd7850 than on FGLRX, what kernel/driver are you using?

Originally posted by srh420:

Originally posted by DIRT:

The real question is will previous gen hardware benefit from it. Some games like serious same 3 run really bad on the open drivers.

Anything below GCN 1.0 will not be supported thru AMDGPU from what the sounds of it on Phoronix Forums. Other older GPU's will be supported via radeon/radeonsi drivers. As far as feature support things are nearing FGLRX quality, to find out what is supported by your GPU you can go to: https://wiki.freedesktop.org/xorg/RadeonFeature/

When stuff is more feature supported then I can see them making games run better and FGLRX is pretty much dead unless you need workstation software support. As far as Serious Sam 3 i get better performance on the open source driver with a hd7850 than on FGLRX, what kernel/driver are you using?

I'm using an r9 270, similar to the card you use. Doesn't seem to matter what kernel I use. Right now I'm on 4.4. Could be that it takes more cpu overhead. I'm using an phenom II x4. Not the best for thread speed these days. Another game that ran slow was borderlands1 through wine gets about 5 fps even when looking at nothing but sky, that was also blamed on my CPU's lack of ability to power though inefficient code. What cpu do you have?

Originally posted by DIRT:

What cpu do you have?

On the pc that I have with the hd7850 i have a AMD A10-5800k@4.6ghz, even on my Intel machine and the same card it didn't run very great. At least with SS3 using a single core you can use ren_bMultiThreadedRendering=1 & ren_iMaxThreads=4 in the SS3 console to make the performance somewhat better but as far as other games go only time will tell if they get better.

Originally posted by srh420:

Originally posted by DIRT:

What cpu do you have?

On the pc that I have with the hd7850 i have a AMD A10-5800k@4.6ghz, even on my Intel machine and the same card it didn't run very great. At least with SS3 using a single core you can use ren_bMultiThreadedRendering=1 & ren_iMaxThreads=4 in the SS3 console to make the performance somewhat better but as far as other games go only time will tell if they get better.

My performance is about 1/2 what the fglrx driver got on the open drivers in ss3. its 1/3 slower in tf2 where things should be faster. Guess I got a bad hw combo.