AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz - Is It Worth It On Linux?

[Luke]

Open drivers with r600 are enough for open games

They're still just as bad if you use catalyst. Using it means you're actually trying to use your GPU power.

Only the OSS driver is getting better. Using it means you barely use a fraction of the power of your GPU so you wasted your cash on a high end card for no reason.

Not exactly. While any RadeonSI card is a waste of money until the RadeonSI driver catches up (maybe a year?), any mid range r600/Evergreen card should be able to play any FOSS native Linux game that I've ever heard of. Since I don't play pay games, I have no idea what pay games would require at 1080p. The most demanding game I have is 0ad-and it's CPU capacity, not GPU that makes it bog down when there are 600 characters on the board. A Radeon HD5700 is quite enough for 0ad. Scorched3d is more GPU demanding-and does NOT like the SB optimization in Mesa. Even so, worst case with the most trees on the islands and an HD5700 is still 20+fps, you won't see any slideshowing. You'll get 30-50fps on easier maps. With the LLVM backend on a Radeon 6750, I've seen as much as 80fps in Scorched3d.

With pay games out of the question, I need not worry abou WINE or Steam. Therfore, I have no reason to buy anything bigger than the HD6750, and I only went that big because r600 was quite a bit slower in Summer 2012. Unless you pay for games, don't pay for big, power-hogging video cards.

If you are building for Linux right now and will play open games, I recommend AMD r600/evergreen with open drivers, kernel 3.11, and power management enabled. If you want to run a proprietary driver you will have better luck with Nvidia. I actually found in May 2012 that Catalyst at that time needed to HD6750 to give enough 2d performance for video playback using xv and video editing in kdenlive, while Mesa would give good 2D results even with a Radeon 4350 for those same jobs.

[Panix]

I'd say that buying a high-end AMD card for linux use is foolish. If you look at the benchmarks you see that the linux versions of the drivers are abysmally slow compared to the windows versions. So you pay for nothing basically.

This combined to the sad fact that driver support is always lagging on new graphics hardware with linux, you're going to see needless problems.

Believe me, I haven't bought Nvidia since the horrible RF filtering fiasco of Geforce 1-2 - but having seen how bad AMD support for linux is, I'm definately considering to get a Nvidia for my next card.

I agree with the first part. But, why does every test only benchmark the card for games? What about 2D video playback and related use? There's some 3D tests but the software seems to be games mostly.

AMD and Nvidia binary drivers might be best for games unless it's open source games? But, buying a high-end card seems to invite trouble for a lot of cost?

Also, I read that there was going to be some tests for 2D (video playback) but that was over a month ago so where is it? I thought of buying a kepler card but if there's tearing, then maybe not. I read on the nvidia site, the Nvidia devs were not responding to linux users asking about the problem.

So, that leaves AMD which has some SI and NI cards that might or might not be good. The FOSS drivers might offer UVD w/ only radeon(si) drivers or maybe the problem of tearing etc. exists there as well? This is never tested here, though? Why not include 2D in the tests?

[n3wu53r]

60+%

>barely a fraction

Ok troll confirmed.

60% is r600g...........
7970 is radeonsi
Plus it's 60% of Linux catalyst which is way worse then windows catalyst.
60% is still less then 100%.
Or you can get nvidia which is the same on Linux and windows and the binary driver is of great quality.
It's the pragmatic choice.

[chris200x9]

Using it means you barely use a fraction of the power of your GPU

60+%

>barely a fraction

Ok troll confirmed.

[n3wu53r]

Nice trolling. So you're saying that you've been using ATI (Now AMD) cards for a long time but now are about to dump them because of crappy linux support? Really? You made it through their REALLY crappy days and just as they're starting to get better your like "AMD is too crappy I'm switching!"? LOL

They're still just as bad if you use catalyst. Using it means you're actually trying to use your GPU power.

Only the OSS driver is getting better. Using it means you barely use a fraction of the power of your GPU so you wasted your cash on a high end card for no reason.

[chris200x9]

Believe me, I haven't bought Nvidia since the horrible RF filtering fiasco of Geforce 1-2 - but having seen how bad AMD support for linux is, I'm definately considering to get a Nvidia for my next card.

Nice trolling. So you're saying that you've been using ATI (Now AMD) cards for a long time but now are about to dump them because of crappy linux support? Really? You made it through their REALLY crappy days and just as they're starting to get better your like "AMD is too crappy I'm switching!"? LOL

[ACiD]

Has support for the 7970 gotten better? Will 3.11 help when it is released? I have a 7970 and want to make the switch to linux from windows but don't want to if it's more trouble then it's worth.

I'd say that buying a high-end AMD card for linux use is foolish. If you look at the benchmarks you see that the linux versions of the drivers are abysmally slow compared to the windows versions. So you pay for nothing basically.

This combined to the sad fact that driver support is always lagging on new graphics hardware with linux, you're going to see needless problems.

Believe me, I haven't bought Nvidia since the horrible RF filtering fiasco of Geforce 1-2 - but having seen how bad AMD support for linux is, I'm definately considering to get a Nvidia for my next card.

[javy29sp]

Has support for the 7970 gotten better? Will 3.11 help when it is released? I have a 7970 and want to make the switch to linux from windows but don't want to if it's more trouble then it's worth.

[Kivada]

I won't have to fiddle with OC (I don't trust myself with that).

Eh, as before overclocking is pretty damn safe these days so long as you don't bother increasing voltages, pretty much every card can hit the same speed as any factory overclocked card on on the market. For example, any HD7970 can hit the 1050Mhz Core/6Ghz VRam speed of the HE7970Ghz and can even go faster then that without touching the voltages, the reason they don't at stock is because of noise since the cooler can handle the heat, just not without making it run loud enough that people would complain about the noise.

The few outliers in that would be certain custom types like the models that come with a preinstalled liquid cooler or something like the MSI Lightning series, though that's also got tons of marketing hype about how many extra voltage regulation rails and whatnot they added that are just beyond overkill and add no actual benefit unless you're going for cryogenic level temperatures for competition class overclocking.

Thus any 680 should be able to hit around the 1.2GhzCore/6.*Ghz VRam of the factory overclocked cards.

[Cybolic]

I'm convinced. GTX 680 4GB it'll be; especially since I won't have to fiddle with OC (I don't trust myself with that). Maybe I'll give AMD a new chance in 3-5 years.

Thanks Kano, smitty3268 and Kivada for the advice.