AMD Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Card Sweeps Benchmarks 201
MojoKid writes "AMD launched yet another high-end graphics card based on their Radeon HD 5800 series technology, and this time it's a dual-GPU variant. Considering the fact that AMD's Radeon HD 5870 is currently the fastest single-GPU powered graphics card currently on the market, the new dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970 should offer performance that completely outclasses any other single graphics card on the market right now. The card has 3200 stream processors under the hood, though its graphics engines are built on 40nm manufacturing technology, so power consumption isn't actually too insane. The card does exceptionally well in the usual benchmarks, as expected." HotHardware has begun providing single-page views — a user-friendly decision. PCPer.com also has coverage. And pcpro.co.uk wonders whether, at 13" (33 cm) in length, the new card will even fit in most PC cases.
Don't forget Anandtech (Score:5, Informative)
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Or Poland
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Don't try. I spent thousands of dollars on counseling, but alas, it was in vain. The memory remains.
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With such a long card, there are going to be some definite fitting issues even on many larger cases. Is it time for me to bring my SC-750A cases back into use?
games? (Score:4, Funny)
In any case I can imagine the computer roaring under my table...and myself in a corner crying like a baby out of fear.
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Are you kidding? Driver support for Radeon is excellent now - better than NVIDIA. And it's continuing to improve. I think there are some older cards that are still badly supported.
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better, like good hardware accelerated video decoding?
Or are you comparing open source drivers?
I know Nvidia has some suck in its drivers too, but the ATI ones are terrible.
unfortunate you (Score:2)
i have been going on ATI since 6 years, and never looked back. if you have been fucked up in the ass, change your brand/provider. actually you will always get screwed if you choose the wrong brand/provider.
always go with sapphire or asus for ATI cards. sapphire is the best, Asus is also as reliable.
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Re:games? (Score:4, Insightful)
Odd. I have either the 4830 or 4850 (I can't remember which) and it's working fine under Linux (I use the proprietary drivers). Oh well, sorry to hear that. I should have known when I said support was good I'd immediately get posts from people who'd had problems. Hopefully they'll resolve your issues soon. The release cycle seems pretty fast - certainly far, far better than it used to be.
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Sometimes when I scroll the text isn't cleared correctly- so there are two repeated lines of the same text... Maybe I should try a driver update... But what are the odds it'll make things better instead of making things worse? The fact that the current driver I'm using is crap, doesn't give me much confidence in the newer drivers... So I'll have to wait till I have a whole spare day free...
The last time I had this problem with Nvidia was
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Nelson? Is that you?
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No. NVIDIA's binary blob as well as the open source versions still work better than the ATi cards in any machine. Heck, I would say the ATi drivers don't work very well in Windows.
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ATI drivers work well enough for me in Win XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, on a HD3200, 4870 and 5870 respectively.
On the other hand the nForce 4 chipset on my motherboard died and my 8800GTS 512 died, so I tend to avoid their stuff now.
Aren't anecdotes great?
Re:games? (Score:4, Informative)
In windows, I'm seeing more stability in games with the ATI card. Anecdotal, yes, but I believe that ATI's drivers have certainly improved on both Windows and Linux and no longer deserve their former reputation.
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nVidia chipsets are gigantic failures, especially under Linux, or any version of Windows other than that for which they were designed (and they very much were - or at least, any necessary workarounds went into the drivers for Windows.) But amusingly, I have an nForce-something (2?) machine with 6150LE graphics, and while the chipset is a source of hassle (suspend/resume was flaky even under windows) the video card part of the system was solid even under Linux. Now I have a Phenom II 720 with AMD chipset and
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That's funny, I've never had a single problem with any nVidia chipsets or graphics cards and that's pretty much all I buy.
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PS: Don't try this at home kids.
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PS: Don't try this at home kids.
Why not? (though i'd preffer to have a better indication of the timing than "until lightly brown on various plastic parts")
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*Try gaming in Windows and TV out in Linux.
The last ATI card I had was a 9600XT, but I never had any real trouble with ATI cards on Windows, and I've had many of them.
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I have a machine with an ATI 4870 card that dual boots Ubuntu 9.10 and Windows 7. I haven't had any issues at all and it just plain worked out of the box with both operating systems.
I finally got to see what all the hoopla was with Crysis. :)
Also, Ubuntu 9.10 + compiz seems to work just fine on my 3 year old laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon x1600. Again, I didn't do anything special and it just plain worked without any intervention from me.
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For those of us that skip a performance generation, the answer is hell yes. Not only does it allow us to play the games you've been enjoying in "pretty view" but will give us other support we've been missing.
# 3D stereoscopic display/glasses support
# Integrated HD audio controller
# Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
# Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
Re:games? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem for me is, what the heck games would I play on it?
It's overkill (hell, any 3 year old video board I could buy at Goodwill Computer is overkill) for any MMORPG. Any in any other field, the game companies have all pretty much abandoned the PC anyways, what you get these days is nothing but ports of something originally designed for a console.
We don't need "more powerful" video boards. We need well written, well designed, must-play, PC-only titles that show off what the PC, and only the PC, can offer. And that ain't happening. When MS Game Studios went "all Xbox, all the time", shit all over great franchises like Mechwarrior and Crimson Skies, and left a generation of gamers thinking Halo was 'tha be5t th1ng EVAR', the PC was doomed. It's only gotten worse with Activision, EA, and the rest following suit.
The PC didn't die as a gaming platform, but it's barely hanging on life support these days and the only thing keeping it going is the MMORPG market. Sad.
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Drakensang, The Witcher, and Dragon Age.
Buy them nao.
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Eh...I've played both the 360 and the PC version, and the PC version is still vastly superior. Regardless of which direction the game was done in (consoles -> PC or PC -> consoles) it still feels at home on the PC.
Still, I agree with the overall premise of the thread...PC gaming has been on the decline because PC exclusives are no longer as big a deal. It's a real shame, since the days of needing to drop two grand on a gaming PC are gone. About $500-$600 will build you a PC that can play almost any
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300 watts? Just for the video board? That's insane. Throw in power supply inefficiency, and the power needed to run the rest of the machine (cpus, etc), AND the power for a decent display for this (after all, anything less than a 30" won't "do justice" to the card), and you'd better make sure this is on a power circuit by itself. Over its lifetime, this thing could end up eating $1,000.00 or more of electricity. Oh well, you could always u
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I want to use the exhaust heat to heat up my hot water heater. Have a little pony tank and a closed circuit TEC cooler between the case and the tank that can tie into my PC water-cooling setup. Idea being every time someone turn on the water in the house the PC get a nice cool drink and dumps something back to the hot water heater.
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I fear this entire generation of cards will be overkill (bordering on gross overkill) until the next generation of consoles come out.
Microsoft ruined PC gaming... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Microsoft's fault. They have now, single handedly, broken their own market. No longer do we need to upgrade our PCs, or our PC graphics cards, or even our OS. No, now all we need to do is get on the bandwagon and buy an XBox console, which has a lifespan of about 5 years.
So instead of spending $2,000+ on a PC with a $400+ graphics card (every two years) and a new OS every 5 years, now we just spend $400 and buy a bunch of games at $50 to $60 dollars a pop.
Hmm, I wonder how that worked out business wise? Let's dwell on that...
1. Major PC vendors markets: Dell, HP, Sony, Lenovo, Gateway, etc? Destroyed. Now they end up selling a bunch of low-end netbooks and cheap $500 PCs, enough for browsing the web, watching videos, listening to music, etc.
2. High end $400+ video graphic cards market from nVidia and AMT/ATI. Destroyed. Nope, who needs a video card that a game doesn't use. After all, all games are now made for consoles, and the consoles are all over 4 years old!
3. 64 bit multi-core computing for home? Destroyed. After all, who needs multi-core computing except for the business and science/eng/tech sectors? A 32 bit (aka 4G RAM) computer works just fine for the internet, office, and financial management of home users. Ok, some may need to edit photo's and movies, I'll grant that.
The problem is that the Microsoft business manager bean counters just didn't think the problem through. The PC gaming market was pushing the technology envelope forward, for better or worse. And all other vendors and software markets (aka the Windows eco system) benefited from those gains. Later they realized, uh oh!, we are shooting ourselves in the foot, and tried to keep it going with "Games for Windows". Little did they realize, by that time, it was all over.
I may never buy another PC, or graphics card again. Someone please explain why I should? Does the amortization of costs actually benefit us over the long run? Stuck with 4 to 5 year old console technology that does not push the envelope? Unlike some slashdotters, from a game, I want a total and absolute simulated environmenal realism. I don't just want to "play a game". I can muck around with Monopoly if I just wanted to "play a game". No I want to be emersed, as if I have been taken to another world. Games must be worth my time, not just something to fidget around with while I'm bored. I want photo-realism, possibly ray traced real time graphics, with true weather and environmental sounds. That's the goal I "was" chasing. That "was" the goal I was helping by buying the latest and greatest tech. But now, Microsoft has just killed that goal for me.
Side note: It seems all vendors of all types now from cell phones, to PC hardware and software, are all hell bent on getting every living being on the planet on some kind of subscription service. To that I say "One Time Cost" is better than the "Recurring Cost" model.
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Yes, but will it help browse /. any faster?
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Crysis runs full everything 1920x1080 on a 9800GX+. I don't get below 45FPS until I get to the alien/battleship fight or the end boss.
As far as nearly a teraflop of double precision floating point performance, my 9800GTX+ has been just under that mark, with a 9800GX2 surpassing it. Teraflop processing power isn't exactly a new thing, although double precision is something pretty new to video cards.
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AMD cards don't support CUDA.
I'm not sure why PCpro is whining... (Score:5, Insightful)
For benchmark bragging rights, it doesn't even have to fit into a case. It'll just be tested benchtop, get the numbers it needs, and be a success. For price-insensitive gaming enthusiasts, it barely matters if it fits in an existing case. The sort of people who buy the top-of-the-line card(rather than the 90% of the performance, 50% of the price model) can (and will) just buy a new case.
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Honestly getting cards to fit has been a problem for a while, and this is just a worse then usual example. I'm glad they are bringing it up. My GTX 260 barely fits in my case, and it's not exactly a small case.
The board manufacturers seem to have lost touch with people who want hardware that can actually be installed without requiring substantial case modification.
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Or case manufacturers could, oh I don't know make cases that support cards that are the maximum length of what is allowed in the PCI-E spec? Even these new cards are still a little shorter than the maximum allowed.
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Very true. I have had to deal with some of these max length cards, it is definitely not a AMD or NVIDIA problem, it is a case manufacturer problem.
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Hell, my 8800GT barely fit in my CoolerMaster Centurion 5.
Nvidia (Score:2, Troll)
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/17/2035200/NVIDIA-Ships-Decent-DX10-Graphics-Card-For-Under-100
The technology idols can fall over-night. Let's hope they can come back, it's bad for consumers to have only 1 option.
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In other news Nvidia just released a sub 100$ card. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/17/2035200/NVIDIA-Ships-Decent-DX10-Graphics-Card-For-Under-100 [slashdot.org] The technology idols can fall over-night. Let's hope they can come back, it's bad for consumers to have only 1 option.
Nvidias new sub $100 card is slower than last generation sub $100 9600GSO 384MB and TWO generations old sub $100 8800GS 384MB.
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But it supports DX10, and that is the big deal.
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AMD's Idea of "Launch" (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a comment on AMD's business, marketing, and PR, rather than their technical team. AMD has unquestionably won the latest round against NVidia, who will have to wait until next year (and miss the holidays) before they have a shot at retaking the top performer and price-performance crowns back.
But let's be real. The 5850 and 5870 have already "launched" too. But unfortunately AMD's idea of a "launch" is "you can buy it 4-16 weeks from now."
I see a lot of companies "making their deadlines" this way. i.e. by not actually making them. Surprised at how often the press gives them a pass on it.
Re:AMD's Idea of "Launch" (Score:4, Informative)
Anecdotally, the situation is not as bad as "4-6 weeks". I have a 5850. I pre-ordered it a couple of days before launch. I got it the following week.
According to the web forum of the retailer I shopped with (overclockers.co.uk) the stock has been trickling in in small shipments. If the shipments are never quite large enough to finish off the retailer's pre-order book, the item may never appear as "in stock" on the website (giving the impression there aren't any around at all), even though people who order are actually getting them reasonably promptly.
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Oh, I have no doubt a few thousand of them have shipped overall. But these cards launched in September. They are still so far off from meeting demand that it is a joke.
Have a look around for your card today. You will find every retailer out of stock. ETAs are now running into December when they are given at all. And you will find it on ebay, for a ~25-50% premium. Most customers who want this (at anywhere near the MSRP) are still waiting 2 months after the launch, and that could turn to 3 months or more.
Ima
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If the availability situation now is worse than it was at launch, that's distressing.
There may be a technical reason for the supply problems. Take with a pinch of salt, since this is Charlie Demerjian:
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/11/16/ati-58xx-parts-delayed-bit-more/ [semiaccurate.com]
I suspect that if you're in the market for a high end video card now, you're still better off ordering a 58xx than waiting for Fermi.
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I bought a 5870 shortly after launch with no issues. After the reviews came out and circulated, one of the salesman at the same store said "Who did you kill to get a 5870?"
It is immediately before Christmas, all hot new products are in short supply. Also, I think the suppliers were blowing out inventory at the end of August, which temporarily reduced prices and also reduced inventory for the Christmas season. I was comparing pricing at the end of August to current for the identical and similar product.
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Of course they shipped a few thousand of them. I should have added a disclaimer at the bottom that I didn't need to hear from each one of the lucky few who managed to get one. :)
What was I expecting? To be able to buy their "launched" product, within 2-3 months after the launch, at or near MSRP.
Hey, all I'm saying is, to call this a "launch" is a joke. I think AMD would be smart to say "limited availability" and jack the price so that they are capturing ebay dollars instead of letting lucky people like you
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It's not really AMD's fault. I'm sure they are as concerned about missing the hoilday sales rush as you are. TSMC promised them lots of 40nm chips and failed to deliver. There is no one else who can do 40nm chips, so AMD is screwed until chip makers roll out 32nm production lines and AMD can finish designing a 32nm chip.
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Yup, that seems to be the case. But it _is_ AMD's fault that they claimed they had a "launch" in September - in fact they go right on with the fantasy and "launch" even more products they can't actually sell in November. Why not instead just be honest with senior management, and with customers and retailers, and call this what it is: "limited availability."
Fix your damn drivers! (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, the card can be the hottest thing in existence but if the system reboots due to a driver (per the system log) and there are numerous complaints, maybe you should spend more time getting the drivers right.
I have a pair of ATI 4870's. When I put it into Crossfire mode, the games work great. When I take them back out of crossfire, the system can reboot 4 or 5 times during Windows startup before the system finally starts. Occasionally the system will reboot during regular Windows startup. Log errors indicate a problem with an ati driver. (I have three monitors. Going into crossfire loses access to the other card with two monitors so I have to come out of crossfire to recover.)
Comments in the forums is to upgrade the drivers. But jeeze, I have to use a registry cleaner and driver cleaner to get every little bit of older ati driver from the system or I have no end of driver problems when I upgrade. Once it's cleaned and an upgrade installed, it brings it back to the occasional reboot and reboot when coming back from Crossfire.
If you can't get your drivers right, people won't buy your cards more than once and the folks that do and experience problems will turn folks away from your business. I know I recount this story on the forums I frequent.
[John]
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I always buy nVidia because it may not always be the fastest, but it will always work better than ATI, especially on Linux. If you happen to be able to use the free ATI driver, I hear things are pretty good :)
The thing that makes this utterly pathetic is that I've been having problems with ATI drivers since the Mach32. All these years, and ATI still can't figure out how these driver thingies work.
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OTOH, the nvidia card in my media center refuses to read the EDID of my projector.
Linux nVidia driver only reads EDID 1.x, no 2.0. If the manufacturer fails to put a useful backup EDID 1.x as required by EDID 2.0 spec then you end up having to fuck with modelines (I did it under the free 'nv' driver on a HP laptop with a Quadro and a bad fallback EDID for the internal flat panel, then put those modelines into a conf for the nvidia driver. So yes, that is retarded. But the manufacturer of your projector is probably ultimately responsible for not following spec. It certainly would be nice
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I've had similar experiences in Windows and agree wholeheartedly.
That, in combination with the fact that there is no viable 3D with ATi on FreeBSD, leads me to use pretty much anyone other than ATi for my graphics chips, when possible.
Oh, and while you can hack their drivers to install on notebooks pretty easily, ATi still puts the stupid checks in the software to prevent the drivers from installing on notebooks.
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Luckily, MobiltyModder [driverheaven.net] works and is pretty easy to use. Updating to the current driver cleared up the bluescreening issues I was having with Torchlight and everything.
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Mobility modder was what I was referring to when I mentioned "hack their drivers to install on notebooks pretty easily".
Still, I prefer Intel and nVidia where I've never needed to do that.
However, I didn't have a choice on my new notebook, and MM allowed me to upgrade from Vista to XP, and therefore they will have my undying love.
So run it in Crossfire mode. (Score:2)
When I put it into Crossfire mode, the games work great. When I take them back out of crossfire, the system can reboot 4 or 5 times during Windows startup before the system finally starts.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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Didn't read the whole comment, eh? :)
When not gaming I use a three monitor setup. Left in portrait for viewing pdfs, center for the open ssh windows for programming, and right for the browser to see if what I'm doing is working and throw up any errors when I miss something.
When I want to game, I bring it into crossfire mode. That shuts off the video output on the second card which disables the two 17" LCDs and leaves the 21" CRT active. When I'm done gaming and want to reactivate the two LCDs, I flip off cr
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When I want to game, I bring it into crossfire mode. That shuts off the video output on the second card which disables the two 17" LCDs and leaves the 21" CRT active. When I'm done gaming and want to reactivate the two LCDs, I flip off crossfire mode which requires a reboot. Upon startup though, the system may reboot 4 or 5 more times.
I'm not sure what you're doing wrong, but my two 4850's didn't force me to reboot under Windows XP to enter or leave crossfire mode, and neither do they do it under Windows 7...
So unless you have some app running that keeps using Direct3D (which obviously would be something that prevents toggling crossfire) something's very weird on your end...
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Meh, scratch that - just read the 9.11 release notes and found this:
"Resolved Issues for All Windows Operating Systems
Now able to enable and disable CrossFire when three displays are configured in
extended mode"
I guess me usually running only 2 displays with my projector on the second card disabled most of the time never made me run into this...
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Yea, one of the real problems was that I started chasing the 8.x and 9.x drivers from ATI and didn't thoroughly remove all the prior ATI drivers first. I'd uninstall and reboot but (based on my final cleanup) there are other entries and drivers that can't be removed via the uninstall process. I would have problem after problem with drivers and reboots until I finally just removed the second card. Heck at one point I could not get my system to come up after upgrading to a 9.x driver. I downreved to 8.x and w
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>
I'll check the Diamond site and see if there's a new suite. I really don't go into Crossfire that often as most games don't support it but the ones that do really look great.
It's up to you, but why anyone would look at the card manufacturer's site for recent driver is really beyond me - if you want drivers for the desktop, go to the chipset manufacturer's site...
Almost all of those cards are exact copies of the reference design modulo some fancy cooling solution - there's nothing for the manufacturers to do other than slapping their logo on the driver.
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The main thing would be all the problems I experienced when I did follow the 8 and 9 path. It finally dropped down to a more acceptable level (not that reboots are generally acceptable but once or twice a month is moreso than once or twice a week).
It's more likely that the problems with the 8.x and 9.x installations were that I hadn't fully (using a registry and driver cleaner) removed all the ati drivers from the system before installing the new one.
So I will check the Diamond site and then I might even ch
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No such problems here with a dual HD4670 setup.
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Oh I'm sure there are lots of folks who don't have problems. I don't know what your setup is but problems can be caused by many factors which is what makes tracking them down such a frustrating experience. In my case, I checked my system logs and did a google search on the error and there were numerous reports with the same question. The answer was to disable some feature in the driver. Unfortunately that wasn't an option with my drivers which was why I started chasing driver upgrades from ATI. Eventually w
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a free mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter tha (Score:2)
a free mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter that this card has should also come with all apple systems but wait they don't even offer a cable like that at all.
also why did they not test 2 of this card in crossfire?
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The bank wouldn't let them have a HELOC, so they could only afford one. So blame the "credit crunch".
Legacy in 2 Years Time? (Score:3, Insightful)
Judging by this year's AMD/ATI driver support, support for this card will probably be considered "legacy" and cease to be maintaned in a couple of years.
That means no more xorg/kernel updates for you!
If the drivers were *truly* open sourced this would never be an issue.
Of course you can buy a "supported" card every 2 years and upgrade.
If you have a laptop with a "legacy" card, well your pretty much f*****!
Thanks but no thanks
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My laptop is an AMD Sempron with ATI "R300M xpress".
The last ATI driver to support the chipset was 9.3 - the current version is 9.10ish(?).
For a good few years I have enjoyed 3d acceleration with 9.3 drivers and xorg 1.4.2 (Slackware 12.2).
However, Slackware 13 contains the latest xorg drivers (1.6) and guess what? the latest xorg is not suppported by 9.3.
I can use the open-source version of the driver but 3d acceleration is pretty poor in comparison.
Even if they fully open-sourced the legacy drivers then t
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My laptop is an AMD Sempron with ATI "R300M xpress".
The last ATI driver to support the chipset was 9.3 - the current version is 9.10ish(?).
Actually, as of right now it's 9.11 (knock yourself out here [amd.com]), which happens to also have been released for their "older" products (like your 300M) that only get driver updates (without new features) every few months...
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Either you're mistaken or ATI's driver download page is broken. They still list 9.3 as the latest driver for anything before the 2000 series.
See: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Legacy/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.7&lang=English [amd.com]
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I think you're confusing ATI with Nvidia...
Actually, I was confusing Linux with Windows - but who the hell wants binary blobs for Linux anyway when the specs for the hardware are out there?
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I seeing 9.11 support for radeon 9500 through HD2100 desktop cards on WinXP and on Vista/Win7. I'll have to hack them for my mobile9700 notebook but they're there.
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Legacy/Pages/radeonaiw_xp.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.24&lang=English [amd.com]
This means I might get windows 7 running on the thing.
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Vaporware (Score:3, Informative)
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PC Gaming! (Score:2)
So what, we save it on games (Score:4, Insightful)
In holland CE Edition of Dragon Age PC cost me less from Bart Smith Online then the console version.
Oh and I got better graphics.
And modding tools.
And mods.
But sure, you go play with your console, you posting this from anyone of them? Oh, so you need a PC AND a console? I only need a PC.
I use a fucking 3870 still. (Score:2)
and im hacking crysis to max graphics settings, overclocking the card, and still getting 15 fps from it in 1920x1200, in playable fashion. i even played age of conan with this thing in full setting, despite the fact that it is a game that doesnt even work well with the 8800 cards it was designed for.
excuse me, but if you people are still having problems with ati cards, its your fucking fault.
you need to buy quality pieces for all the parts in your computer. mobo, cpu, ram, even the dvd reader has to be reli
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and im hacking crysis to max graphics settings, overclocking the card, and still getting 15 fps from it in 1920x1200, in playable fashion.
What?
Work on this Cooling things for Graphics cards (Score:2)
the most annoying thing about new graphics cards generally happens to be the fan sound to cool them off.
it doesnt matter how many pixels/sec it gives to me, or how good it renders, if it creates a huge noise while im playing my game.
daily dingbat (Score:2)
Don't even have to dig into the comments, and I've already landed my daily dingbat.
What does "most" have to do with it? A 500HP V12 won't fit in most passenger cars, either. But wait! You can upgrade your chassis for $60. Perhaps your power train is the bigger concern?
Was the heading on this review "Plebeian concerns on planet drool-worthy?" That must keep the transporter owls flying 24/7.
Or was the i
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first porst!
Actually you were second. Betting you wish you had that graphics card now so that the page would have rendered quicker allowing you to post faster :)
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He couldn't fit it in his case, you insensitive clod!
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That's what she said...
Re:The problem is.... (Score:4, Insightful)
While proprietary support for ATI cards in linux can indeed suck, they do have far better support from the Free drivers. Of course, if you are buying this card to use with the Free drivers, you probably need to rethink your purchase.
That said, I'm a linux user who doesn't do heavy gaming so I don't get big expensive graphics cards, and ATI will be my first choice for the forseeable future.
Re:The problem is.... (Score:4, Informative)
However, I would caution that support for the chip mentioned in this article (Radeon Evergreen) is marked as "TODO" [x.org]. Presumably, it should progress relatively fast, because AMD is basically being helpful.
Nvidia deserves some credit for updating their binary driver regularly, and making helpful changes very fast when alphas of KDE 4 started showing up performance issues in some previously rarely-used features, but AMD has done rather better by actually providing documentation to freedesktop people (even if ATI never maintained their own binary driver very well at all).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have friends that do the same thing I do and most of them have had no where near the same problems with ATI cards. But for me, no more ATI Radeon cards.
I know I don't know you, so forgive me for being a douche, but...maybe you should think about changing careers?