Gentoo update kills support for HD4870

[trigggl]

ati-drivers-12.6_beta has gone stable for amd64 in Gentoo Linux. 12.6 drops support for the HD4870. Other distros may be updating to 12.6 as well. Careful not to update out of 4870 support and not get it back. I'm having to mask 12.6 to go back to 12.4. It really irks me that a vendor would just drop support for their card. Thanks, but no thanks to the open source driver. Maybe I can crunch with the open source driver, maybe I can't. Not planning to find out if I don't have to. >:P

[Slicker]

ati-drivers-12.6_beta has gone stable for amd64 in Gentoo Linux. 12.6 drops support for the HD4870. Other distros may be updating to 12.6 as well. Careful not to update out of 4870 support and not get it back. I'm having to mask 12.6 to go back to 12.4. It really irks me that a vendor would just drop support for their card. Thanks, but no thanks to the open source driver. Maybe I can crunch with the open source driver, maybe I can't. Not planning to find out if I don't have to. >:P

If it aint broke, don't fix it! If your current driver does everything you need it to, don't upgrade. 99% of GPU driver upgrades are for improved gaming experience which makes you wonder why a Linux box would ever need an upgrade......

The Catalyst 12.x drivers added OpenCL 1.2 support. If your favorite project requires it, you have no choice but to upgrade. AMD announced that their implementation of OpenCL 1.2 would drop 48xx support. Up to and including 12.4(which reports itself as 12.3 because AMD evidently doesn't actually test their monthly releases or fix the installation of them once in beta), the 48xx GPUs still worked OK. They just didn't get the OpenCL 1.2 features. With 12.6, it sounds like even the OpenCL 1.0 and 1.1 features no longer work. Luckily, the older driver will work -- at least until the projects start requiring OpenCL 1.2 or higher.

[trigggl]

If it aint broke, don't fix it! If your current driver does everything you need it to, don't upgrade. 99% of GPU driver upgrades are for improved gaming experience which makes you wonder why a Linux box would ever need an upgrade......

Well, as I said, 12.6 went stable for 64-bit in Gentoo. I had to mask it so it would go back to 12.4. I don't know how something that has beta in the name gets configured as stable. That change back to 12.4 also forced a downgrade of my xorg-server...very irritating. You can't stay in the pasture long before packages start having dependency conflicts.