Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 On Linux

[allquixotic]

Interesting.

BTW, I notice you tend to deck out your test systems with pathetically low amounts of RAM. When running extremely demanding tests like Unigine Heaven, isn't it safe to bet that they will be demanding at least that much RAM from the system? For all sorts of caching, textures evicted from GTT, etc.

And let's not forget all the overhead of running Ubuntu as a base...

What I'm saying is, make sure the system isn't swapping while you're doing these tests, or the numbers will be artificially deflated regardless of which GPU you're using.

[dredhammer]

On the first read through this card looked like a must buy for my new system.
Until i started reading up on it in the windows world, some reviewers find it runs too hot and the price point as relates to its competitors and other AMD cards doesn't justify a buy since you can get earlier cards cheaper and better nvidia cards for around the same price.
Yes i know with the gaming crowds its all about the FPS and the most graphic intensive game i will probably get will be the new Unigine game however when i buy a graphics card its got to last at least 3yrs-5yrs in system. I hate the naming scheme of the graphic card companies, turns out this card is based on a lowend chip and not a true successor to the 5870.
So here comes hours of graphic card research.

[Kivada]

On the first read through this card looked like a must buy for my new system.
Until i started reading up on it in the windows world, some reviewers find it runs too hot and the price point as relates to its competitors and other AMD cards doesn't justify a buy since you can get earlier cards cheaper and better nvidia cards for around the same price.
Yes i know with the gaming crowds its all about the FPS and the most graphic intensive game i will probably get will be the new Unigine game however when i buy a graphics card its got to last at least 3yrs-5yrs in system. I hate the naming scheme of the graphic card companies, turns out this card is based on a lowend chip and not a true successor to the 5870.
So here comes hours of graphic card research.

Huh? It's essentially an HD5870 with a better tessellation engine which means it'll do quite well with the new Unigine based stuff, but Michael, as usual didn't do a proper review and left out tests with tessellation enabled. Nor did he bench it with the Gallium3D drivers for it.

[Thatguy]

On the first read through this card looked like a must buy for my new system.
Until i started reading up on it in the windows world, some reviewers find it runs too hot and the price point as relates to its competitors and other AMD cards doesn't justify a buy since you can get earlier cards cheaper and better nvidia cards for around the same price.
Yes i know with the gaming crowds its all about the FPS and the most graphic intensive game i will probably get will be the new Unigine game however when i buy a graphics card its got to last at least 3yrs-5yrs in system. I hate the naming scheme of the graphic card companies, turns out this card is based on a lowend chip and not a true successor to the 5870.
So here comes hours of graphic card research.

the 6870 does not run hot at all, in fact it is one of the best bargins in graphics right now. I don't know where your getting your info, but it is utter fud, now the 6970 does run a alot hotter, but its also a much larger chip.its competing with fermi.

[dredhammer]

Actually the i read the very reviews Sapphire themselves linked to on their official site to show how good the card is.
I dont know if they just took the reviews based on the ratings and didnt bother to read them fully or just hoped people would see the high ratings given and not bother to read the whole review.
The review sites all say its a good card BUT it runs very hot when compared with other cards in its class, is not a true successor to the 5870 and there are cheaper cards that give the same performance.
Again this from the windows gaming crowd so there you go.

[shakespear]

Hi.

Thanks for the review of the card. It went straight into the shopping basket

However I wanted to do the test myself on my current setup so I downloaded the phoronix-test-suite and ran as suggested on page nine of the test: ./phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1102134-IV-SENSORS4225

Since I'm new to this I have probably missed something, but no tests were run. Below is the output of the try

jpe@ubuntu:~/Hämtningar/phoronix-test-suite$ ./phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1102134-IV-SENSORS4225

Phoronix Test Suite v3.0.0

    To Install: pts/unigine-heaven-1.2.0
    To Install:

    Determining File Requirements ..........................................
    Searching Download Caches ..............................................

    2 Tests To Install
        1 File To Download [232.24MB]
        260MB Of Disk Space Is Needed

    pts/unigine-heaven-1.2.0:
        Test Installation 1 of 2
        1 File Needed [232.24 MB]
        Downloading: Unigine_Heaven-2.1.run                       [232.24MB]
        Downloading ........................................................
        Installation Size: 260 MB
        Installing Test @ 21:31:02

    :
        Test Installation 2 of 2
            No installation script found.

        The test executable for pts/unigine-heaven-1.2.0 could not be located.

Any hints to what I need to do in order to get this to work?

[corec]

Hi,
I've been thinking of buying a HD6870. Could anyone give an update on how oss drivers work atm? I use linux(gentoo+gnome) on daily activities(browsing,videos etc) but gaming is mainly on windows 7 so 3d is not that essential on linux. I mainly care that gnome(and usual programs) works just fine with compositing (using metacity's compositor ).