HD 4870 vs GTX 260: My Experience

[Ex-Cyber]

I'm not trying to imply that WoW was the single thing in this case. In general, though, it seems to prompt a lot more actual complaining than any other specific issue.

[Panix]

Oops, I just posted asking for a comparison of these cards! Do I feel like a doofus or what! ;-) Does the Nvidia GTX 260 work well with WINE?

It sounds like AMD is too slow with developing drivers for Linux still but let's face it, the money is still with Windoze. I guess those cards are similar for performance even in Windows. I really want to support ATI but I am not very patient and after going through the motions installing the Nvidia proprietary driver, I am not sure I would be able to deal with the growing pains of ATI drivers/issues right now. Unless, there are some recent developments with AMD/ATI that would suggest the contrary?

[TheBouleOfFools]

Yes, the GTX 260 works just fine with Wine, at least with the games I'm trying to play.

From what I understand from reading a certain post awhile back, the reason Nvidia's drivers are so much better is because their drivers replace a lot of the bottom half of X, whereas ATI is trying to use the Mesa GL implementation. To me that makes it seem more of a problem with Mesa and X, not so much ATI's drivers.

[bridgman]

It was more DRI than Mesa we were trying to stay with, but using the standard stack was definitely a factor. We felt that it was better to try to work with the standard stack rather than bypass big chunks and make it harder for community developers to justify spending effort improving the framework.

Now that we're fully supporting open source driver development, allowing the X/DRI stack and open source drivers to evolve together, we are starting to cheerfully over-write pieces of the stack ourselves. You probably noticed the first change in that direction a year or so ago, when we started providing the ability to combine multiple FireGL cards into a single desktop and split 3D operations across the GPUs and screens :

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...ultiview&num=1

We replaced a bit more of the stack a few months ago in order to provide flicker-free OpenGL compositing across multiple GPUs.

[Kano]

And when do you want to focus on XV?

[Raven3x7]

Well on a sidenote the WINE devs are partially to blame for fglrx's WINE problems, as they not only initially developed WINEs 3d features for Nvidia hardware, but also used Nvidia specific OpenGL extensions.

[grantek]

Yeah, fglrx is giving me less stress/headache than nvidia these days, although it was pretty frustrating when I couldn't use wine for months last year. I'm also using the OSS driver on a different partition and that's been faultless since I upgraded the kernel to 2.6.29 (with RT patches - that's the reason for the second partition).

If I could get some current-generation hardware video decoding out of either driver I'd have no reason to even consider nvidia any more

[Panix]

Sorry to interrupt the discussion. I was wondering what PSU wattage you need (generally speaking) for these cards. In particular, the Nvidia GeForce 260 GTX cards. I read on a 'gpu' site, the wattage used is around 200w so if you had a few 120mm fans, 4 or 5 hard drives (1 with the OS), the rest are for data (so are usually idle or not being stressed), a laser printer, an Intel Quad Core Q6600 CPU @ 95w and an aftermarket fan, what PSU would you need? I tried a 'PSU calculator generator' and the calculation was 380w. But, some people are saying you need at least 500 watts so use 600 or higher. My current PSU is the Corsair HX520w (the one with yellow writing and it's modular). Is that sufficient or would I need an upgrade?

I guess the ATI cards of the higher end 4800 series has a comparable power draw. So, it could apply to either card.

I am thinking of building a 2nd, cheaper system, so I could just use this PSU but maybe I wouldn't have to?

Thanks for any reply. I am sure this question has been asked a thousand times but with newer graphics cards drawing more power.... Also, I am sure it depends on what you're doing and what is being stressed.

[bridgman]

The main thing to keep in mind is that graphics cards draw the bulk of their power from the +12 line, so the amount of total +12 current is more important than the total # of watts at all voltages. You may need a 500W rated supply to get the 380W you need at specific voltages.

Most cards include a recommendation for +12 capacity in a reasonably fully loaded system (ie not a RAID-ed server but not an empty box either).

[Panix]

I found this:

HX520W with a maximum +12V output of 480W (i.e. 40A total output)

So, I should be good using this same PSU for a basic setup (no SLI or anything) with either of these cards?