The NVIDIA/AMD Cards On Linux With The Best Value For 2015 Holiday Shopping

[pal666]

All vendors are using proprietary firmware.

but only fuck you nvidia uses signed firmware which is not available for mesa

[Kano]

Currently only HEVC 8 bit is exposed via VDPAU. Still want to see working HEVC Main 10 support. Maybe we need to wait for Kaby Lake, impoved Skylake with slightly different GPU.

[efikkan]

I'm considering getting a GTX 950 to replace my aging RadeonHD 4550, but I'm hesitant because of the whole issue with Nvidia not delivering the signed firmware to nouveau devs. I'm also considering a GTX 750Ti because the 950 is overkill for my 3D needs, but I really want the dedicated HEVC decoder in the 950.

I wish Nvidia made a low cost/power (fanless) GT 930/940 with the modern video decoder block. I'd buy that in a heartbeat.

All vendors are using proprietary firmware.
Go with the GTX 950, it's a great efficient GPU with HEVC-support.

[DanL]

I'm considering getting a GTX 950 to replace my aging RadeonHD 4550, but I'm hesitant because of the whole issue with Nvidia not delivering the signed firmware to nouveau devs. I'm also considering a GTX 750Ti because the 950 is overkill for my 3D needs, but I really want the dedicated HEVC decoder in the 950.

I wish Nvidia made a low cost/power (fanless) GT 930/940 with the modern video decoder block. I'd buy that in a heartbeat.

[efikkan]

Agreed, need to dump that 5690 for gpu benchmarking. Honestly even the i7's are overkill. The i5 4690K is pretty much the go to chip in gaming circles, though it will slowly be replaced with the 6600K Skylake part obviously. Give it a decent overclock to 4.4-4.8 depending on your luck with the silicon lottery and your good to go. The extra ~$100 you save on the i5 vs the i7 can be put towards upgrading the gpu.

Some overclocking might be in order, but downgrading to a quad core is rather silly for benchmarking. There are already games utilizing 4+ cores, and there will be more to come.
For most optimized games a CPU well below 4 GHz should be enough and the GPU be the main bottleneck (unless it's multi-GPU).

[Slartifartblast]

An i7 isn't "overkill" for gaming, it's just simply unnecessary. HT isn't that useful for gaming, and in some cases will actually lower performance.

As for Skylake, the only reason to choose it over Haswell is because of the IGP. Gamers don't want the IGP, so Skylake isn't worth getting.

It's a pity they didn't make a Skylake with IRIS pro L4 cache eDRAM like the i7-5775C and i5-5675C, it would have been interesting to see what that would have brought to Skylake.

[schmidtbag]

Agreed, need to dump that 5690 for gpu benchmarking. Honestly even the i7's are overkill. The i5 4690K is pretty much the go to chip in gaming circles, though it will slowly be replaced with the 6600K Skylake part obviously. Give it a decent overclock to 4.4-4.8 depending on your luck with the silicon lottery and your good to go. The extra ~$100 you save on the i5 vs the i7 can be put towards upgrading the gpu.

An i7 isn't "overkill" for gaming, it's just simply unnecessary. HT isn't that useful for gaming, and in some cases will actually lower performance.

As for Skylake, the only reason to choose it over Haswell is because of the IGP. Gamers don't want the IGP, so Skylake isn't worth getting.

[WOLF308]

@Michael

I always wonder why you only use the i7-5960x at stock speed - i7-4790k or i7-6700k would be certainly faster at stock speed for single threaded games. If you OC the CPU to 4.4/4.5 GHz it would be fine. If Intel does not send an i7-6700k then you could use the i7-4790k, but I did not see any benchmarks with that the last months. The Turbo speed of the Haswell Refresh is 900 MHz higher compared to the Haswell-E - thats 25% difference! Then you could see more scaling in CPU limited tests - otherwise it is lost time if every card gets the same result.

Agreed, need to dump that 5690 for gpu benchmarking. Honestly even the i7's are overkill. The i5 4690K is pretty much the go to chip in gaming circles, though it will slowly be replaced with the 6600K Skylake part obviously. Give it a decent overclock to 4.4-4.8 depending on your luck with the silicon lottery and your good to go. The extra ~$100 you save on the i5 vs the i7 can be put towards upgrading the gpu.

[vmicho]

Well, just bought 750 Ti KalmX, for 130eur here in Vienna 2 months ago. Cannot complain at all. And it's completely fan-less ^.^
And thanks for the nice tests.

[whitecat]

The R7 370 series does deliver good open-source value too

No, it's a shitty card. The R7 370 and more globally PITCAIRN/CURACAO chipset must be ban. Buy it only if you want troubles or having a underclocked card.
In fact Michael you're lucky that your card works.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76490