AMD Radeon HD 3200 / 780G

With the 780G's Radeon HD 3200 being derived from the RV610, it's to no surprise that its results were almost identical to the Radeon HD 2400 PRO, which is similarly based upon the RV610 core. The Radeon HD 3200 on Linux with the fglrx driver is fast enough to handle Doom 3 and Quake 4 and even Enemy Territory: Quake Wars with lower quality settings. This integrated graphics processor is enough to satisfy a casual gamer, but those looking to achieve the best experience or plan to spend more time gaming than just a few minutes here and there will be best off with a discrete solution. The Radeon HD 3650 512MB, which is a sub-$100 USD PCI Express graphics card, was much faster in the Linux gaming benchmarks. For desktop purposes, the Radeon HD 3200 is certainly adequate and had performed well in our GtkPerf benchmarks. When using GtkDrawingArea, the Radeon HD 3200 had even beat out the Radeon HD 2400 PRO 256MB and Radeon HD 3650 512MB -- likely due to the performance cost attributed to transferring pixmaps from the system memory to video memory.

Unfortunately, at this time AMD has yet to support CrossFire or Hybrid Graphics under Linux. That will hopefully be changing in the near future, but Linux users right now will be unable to utilize either of these multi-GPU technologies. Another current limitation is that right now the Unified Video Decoder (UVD) isn't supported for any MPEG-2, H.264, or VC-1 offloading. The fglrx Linux driver, however, for this chipset supports TexturedVideo. As another note, HDMI is also supported by the fglrx driver and there is already DisplayPort capabilities introduced with this month's driver.

On the open-source side, the xf86-video-ati driver can support the AMD 780G using AtomBIOS while with xf86-video-radeonhd driver the support is just starting to be worked on internally. The RadeonHD driver may utilize AtomBIOS for the Radeon HD 3200, but the support will still likely be some weeks away.

Overall, AMD's 780G Chipset is a success and the Radeon HD 3200 graphics are excellent considering it’s an integrated part that's geared for mainstream users. It's Linux support in the Catalyst package was delivered in the same month, which once couldn't be said for their Linux drivers and new product support. Aside from the graphics, this chipset had zero problems using Ubuntu 8.04 Beta and other recent Linux 2.6 distributions. Shortly we will be looking at the AMD 780G general-purpose Linux performance as we review the ECS A780GM-A and ASRock A780FullDisplayPort motherboards.