I recently had a 6670 (from a computer i built for some1) and first i did a testing tour with it on my computer running Debian Testing. I use an onboard nvidia 8200 with the closed drivers btw and it works rather well (except lately flash is tearing and no way to fix it ).
For the record i dont use any screen compositing although i started compiz for testing purposes with this card. Also i use Xfce 4.8.
So:
I uninstaled the nvidia driver, installed the catalyst 11.9 (at that time that was the latest) and the vaapi driver from the repos (debian testing has quite good fast updates), restarted X and it was working.
Hardware - Asus M3N78-VM mobo (MCP78 chipset), AMD Athlon II x2 250 @3.0 GHz CPU, 4 GB DDR2@800 MHz RAM.
OS; Debian Testing 32-bit, kernel 3.0 (with pae enabled), Xfce 4.8.
Results (i used this card for 2 days):
EVERYTHING was working. This includes suspend/resume.
Playback:
Even HD decoding was working in VLC (to the extent permitted by vaapi which isnt that good as nvidias vdpau, but still it had a very visible impact on CPU).
Flash was more fluid than on nvidia and vsync was constantly on.
Games:
Wine: I fired up LOTRO and maxed out all settings. It worked perfectly.
Native games - i play ocassionally ioquqke based games (Urban Terror, Smokin Guns) - they all worked, only i had to untick the catalyst's optimisations option to get rid of mouse lag (nothing else seemed to be impacted). FPS was constantly capped at 75 because of vsync.
I also tried Regnum Online which was painfully slow on my onboard nvidia. It worked very well at high settings only some very faint almost invisible shadow-related glitches here and there.
Compiz - i did not test this much, but it did was a bit choppier than on nvidia (i have the atlantis plugin and stuff). Note that i prefer to have vsync on. Anyway, it felt stable.
Conclusion - i was very satisfied as i compared this card and drivers to the "venerable" nvidia drivers which work very well and stable.
For the record i dont use any screen compositing although i started compiz for testing purposes with this card. Also i use Xfce 4.8.
So:
I uninstaled the nvidia driver, installed the catalyst 11.9 (at that time that was the latest) and the vaapi driver from the repos (debian testing has quite good fast updates), restarted X and it was working.
Hardware - Asus M3N78-VM mobo (MCP78 chipset), AMD Athlon II x2 250 @3.0 GHz CPU, 4 GB DDR2@800 MHz RAM.
OS; Debian Testing 32-bit, kernel 3.0 (with pae enabled), Xfce 4.8.
Results (i used this card for 2 days):
EVERYTHING was working. This includes suspend/resume.
Playback:
Even HD decoding was working in VLC (to the extent permitted by vaapi which isnt that good as nvidias vdpau, but still it had a very visible impact on CPU).
Flash was more fluid than on nvidia and vsync was constantly on.
Games:
Wine: I fired up LOTRO and maxed out all settings. It worked perfectly.
Native games - i play ocassionally ioquqke based games (Urban Terror, Smokin Guns) - they all worked, only i had to untick the catalyst's optimisations option to get rid of mouse lag (nothing else seemed to be impacted). FPS was constantly capped at 75 because of vsync.
I also tried Regnum Online which was painfully slow on my onboard nvidia. It worked very well at high settings only some very faint almost invisible shadow-related glitches here and there.
Compiz - i did not test this much, but it did was a bit choppier than on nvidia (i have the atlantis plugin and stuff). Note that i prefer to have vsync on. Anyway, it felt stable.
Conclusion - i was very satisfied as i compared this card and drivers to the "venerable" nvidia drivers which work very well and stable.
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