AMD Radeon HD 4250 880G On Linux

At 1920 x 1080 for the ioquake3-powered World of Padman, the performance of the 880G and 890GX was once again close.

Unigine Sanctuary is too demanding for the Radeon HD 4250 and Radeon HD 4290 IGPs. With Sanctuary not even running well, the Unigine Tropics and most-demanding Unigine Heaven tests are unthinkable with this advanced game engine.

At 1024 x 768, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was not playable with either the 880G or 890GX, but the 880G was actually faster by about 16%.

As was much the conclusion after the original ATI Radeon HD 4290 Linux testing, if you exclusively intend to use a motherboard with an 880G/890GX chipset for just desktop applications, web browsing, and with or without a compositing manager, you will be fine with one of these newer ATI Radeon HD integrated graphics processors. However, if OpenGL performance is important to you with anything besides running a compositing window manager or the most basic ioquake3-type games, you will be best off with a discrete graphics processor even if it is a very cheap PCI Express graphics card.

If video playback is of interest to you on Linux, AMD's XvBA (X-Video Bitstream Acceleration) implementation continues to be a major disappointment even with the most recent driver and continues to be only exposed through the closed-source XvBA to VA-API front-end. NVIDIA is the hands-down winner right now on Linux for accelerated video playback with any of their past few generation GeForce graphics cards and the VDPAU support found within their proprietary driver. The plus side going to ATI hardware is the open-source support, for which the 880G/890GX chipsets there is kernel mode-setting, the classic Mesa DRI driver, and an emerging Gallium3D driver, but with this IGP hardware not being the fastest with the performance-optimized Catalyst driver, the open-source performance is sadly worse.

For the consumer though that is interested in this hardware, our OpenGL tests have found the 880G and 890GX performance to be close to each other in most scenarios, so picking out an appropriate motherboard should come down to other features and factors.