AMD Drops Radeon HD 4000 Series & Older Catalyst Driver Support
Well users of AMD’s Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series won’t be happy to hear that AMD appears to be axing support for these GPUs sometime this summer. With the release of Catalyst 12.7, AMD will drop support for pre-Evergreen hardware, however, legacy drivers will be maintained for older architectures when it comes to Microsoft’s Windows operating systems. Linux users will get the short straw, as the legacy driver for them will not be updated with the new X.Org Server and Linux kernel support. From the looks of things, the last driver to support the older generation of GPUs will be the Catalyst 12.6 driver, however Linux users still get the short straw again as the newer drivers once again wont be compatible due to X.Org server releases and Linux kernel updates. For users with older graphics cards, it looks like they will have to make do with legacy support or upgrade their hardware.
With the Radeon HD 2000 (R600) through Radeon HD 4000 series (RV770) support going away, this means for all future major Linux distribution updates (Ubuntu 12.10, Fedora 18, etc), there is no option but to use the open-source Radeon Linux driver. With new X.Org Server releases and Linux kernel updates, the Catalyst driver before the support is discontinued from mainline (Catalyst ~12.6; fglrx 8.97 will be the last) will no longer be compatible. It is as simple as that.
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