Understand your predicament. Though i recently bought a 4870 and love it for my games. I will also be very piss if they announce they will terminate my 4870 support after 2 years.
Next round just buy Nvidia then, when you really need it.
I have a thought on why they would terminate support for x1900 series and maybe not do the same for 4800. x1900 series is pre-AMD/ATI days and the design is vastly different from 2400XT,3870 and 4800 which is design along the same path. Unless 5870 is vastly different, they would not terminate support for any of the three mentioned. Anyway, we shall see.
[citation][nom]Windaria[/nom]Actually, the latest x-server is now shipping in most recent Linux releases, and due to an exposed flaw in the older ATI drivers, it requires the newer ones, that have dropped the support for "older" cards that were being shipped as recently as a year ago. This means that, say, I can use Ubuntu 8.10, but 9.04? No, not without a round-about hack that is being used, and for how long? Or, without the open-source drivers, which, say, Regnum does not work with, because they aren't yet up to par.So, no, what ATI did was simply not acceptable. When people buy hardware, there is a reasonable expectation of having working drivers for about, what, 3 years? Cutting it off after 1 year of a product being sold is, again, simply not acceptable.[/citation]