AMD Radeon HD 7950: Southern Islands Isn't Yet A Penguin Holiday

[Qaridarium]

I will never get the time back from reading Q's insane rantings... but hell, I definitely enjoyed the first few posts, then it got annoying.

o I'm so sorry

just for the Quality control from when it was inconvenient?

maybe next time i make it shorter.

you know anyone need quality Assurance and without criticism and ratings i can not improve my performance!

do please rate my performance on every single write message.

maybe you can help me with suggestions for improvement?

more Bridgman bashing or less more trolling or less more FUD or less more insulting or less more insanity or less?

please i need you to improve my performance!

[tomtomme]

the release date of the article do not count the date of the writing count.

and he write it days before the release date.

you always have a lag between writing a article and releasing the article.

I know that. Did you read more than the first sentence of my post? I suggestet to UPDATE this tiny thing in the article afterwards. We are not in printed press anymore, where something that was written can´t be updated.

[Qaridarium]

I know that. Did you read more than the first sentence of my post? I suggestet to UPDATE this tiny thing in the article afterwards. We are not in printed press anymore, where something that was written can´t be updated.

its like the phoronix forum you can't update your forum posts because editing is deactivated after 30 minutes.

because michael prefer the old style "Printed press" way.

like it or not but its a valid way to go. other ways are also valid but the other ways are not michaels/phoronix ways.

make your own website and news side and brenchmark side and use your style i'm sure you will be happy!

[tomtomme]

its like the phoronix forum you can't update your forum posts because editing is deactivated after 30 minutes.

because michael prefer the old style "Printed press" way.

like it or not but its a valid way to go. other ways are also valid but the other ways are not michaels/phoronix ways.

Ah, ok! Why didn´t you say in the first place?
If that is your guideline, I respect that, even if it sounds a bit "old fashioned" for me. But that´s ok for me, I´m old fashioned with other things. It is just important to know such things, so that I can read phoronix articles in the right way. So thanks for the info - good to know.

make your own website and news side and brenchmark side and use your style i'm sure you will be happy!

Thanks, I am. Already got my own blog since quite a time

[crazycheese]

Second thing is, that my 7950 worked also with 12.1, ....

Besides: I had an Nvidia GTX260 before and mainly switched to ati because of www.sebastian-siebert.de which wrote a very nice script for opensuse, that automagically re-builds the driver after a kernel-upgrade without any user-intervention. With suse-tumbleweed as a rolling distro and NVIDIA I hit the text-console almost every week and had to rebuilt myself...

Cheers, Tom

As someone who switched exactly from gtx 260 to 7950, what were the changes you have encountered?
2D performance under normal work desktop? 3D? Wine? Compositing(what WMs?)? Video acceleration? Energy drain load/idle? Do you have windows installed for gaming(if any)? OpenCL? Bugs in applications? Was change worth it? Was money worth it? Difficulties or quirks?

Thanks if you answer!

[tomtomme]

As someone who switched exactly from gtx 260 to 7950, what were the changes you have encountered?
2D performance under normal work desktop? 3D? Wine? Compositing(what WMs?)? Video acceleration? Energy drain load/idle? Do you have windows installed for gaming(if any)? OpenCL? Bugs in applications? Was change worth it? Was money worth it? Difficulties or quirks?

Thanks if you answer!

Wow, many questions.
- 2D-performance: I use KDE and noticed no change in 2D performance, both cards are pretty fast with full effects/compositing under KDE. Only thing is that catalyst restricts my monitor to 60hz instead of possible 75hz. I don´t know if this was the case with nvidia also because I changed monitor (good old CRT 21" to LCD 27") and graphics-card at the same time, and at CRT the whole frequency thing is a completely other story
- Wine: I made no benchmarks, but wine works as before - I did not test 3D things in wine yet.
- Video acceleration works through vaapi via vlc 2.0 since some months - in xbmc directly through xvba - so there is also no big difference for me compared to nvidias vdpau
- OpenCL: don´t use it
- Win7: for gaming yes. superfast! a big update compared to the gtx260 and even highly overclocked more quiet with my gigabyte windforce 3 model
- EnergyDrain: don´t know how to measure that, but as win-gaming-performance, this is covered by all the benchmarks out there. To sum them up: idle-power-drain is much lower than with gtx260 (or any other current card not amd7000series). I assume this is also valid for linux? How can I test?
- bugs: none so far
- change: was worth it in respect of lower idle-powerdrain, lower noise, lower temperature at load and idle state and higher gaming-performance
- money: it may a bit too expensive right now, because there is no competition from nvidia right now (delayed kepler). The old GTX580 can´t compete in terms of power drain, noise-level. Only if you look only at perfomance-for-money the 7950 is too expensive. So if you want to save 50-80 bucks wait until Nvidia Kepler arrives... and maybe Kepler is even better, but then it is again quite sure, that the price will also be higher, I think
- difficulties: none

[tomtomme]

As someone who switched exactly from gtx 260 to 7950, what were the changes you have encountered?
2D performance under normal work desktop? 3D? Wine? Compositing(what WMs?)? Video acceleration? Energy drain load/idle? Do you have windows installed for gaming(if any)? OpenCL? Bugs in applications? Was change worth it? Was money worth it? Difficulties or quirks?

Thanks if you answer!

Wow, many questions.
- 2D-performance: I use KDE and noticed no change in 2D performance, both cards are pretty fast with full effects/compositing under KDE. Only thing is that catalyst restricts my monitor to 60hz instead of possible 75hz. I don´t know if this was the case with nvidia also because I changed monitor (good old CRT 21" to LCD 27") and graphics-card at the same time, and at CRT the whole frequency thing is a completely other story
- Wine: I made no benchmarks, but wine works as before - I did not test 3D things in wine yet.
- Video acceleration works through vaapi via vlc 2.0 since some months - in xbmc directly through xvba - so there is also no big difference for me compared to nvidias vdpau
- OpenCL: don´t use it
- Win7: for gaming yes. superfast! a big update compared to the gtx260 and even highly overclocked more quiet with my gigabyte windforce 3 model
- EnergyDrain: don´t know how to measure that, but as win-gaming-performance, this is covered by all the benchmarks out there. To sum them up: idle-power-drain is much lower than with gtx260 (or any other current card not amd7000series). I assume this is also valid for linux? How can I test?
- bugs: none so far
- change: was worth it in respect of lower idle-powerdrain, lower noise, lower temperature at load and idle state and higher gaming-performance
- money: it may a bit too expensive right now, because there is no competition from nvidia right now (delayed kepler). The old GTX580 can´t compete in terms of power drain, noise-level. Only if you look only at perfomance-for-money the 7950 is too expensive. So if you want to save 50-80 bucks wait until Nvidia Kepler arrives... and maybe Kepler is even better, but then it is again quite sure, that the price will also be higher, I think
- difficulties: none

[Qaridarium]

Ah, ok! Why didn´t you say in the first place?
If that is your guideline, I respect that, even if it sounds a bit "old fashioned" for me. But that´s ok for me, I´m old fashioned with other things. It is just important to know such things, so that I can read phoronix articles in the right way. So thanks for the info - good to know.
Thanks, I am. Already got my own blog since quite a time

its not my guidline its the micheael/phoronix guideline.

for myself ""old fashioned"" i like it and i don't like it i like it for other members stuff but i don't like it for my own stuff because i need to edit my stuff a lot because of fixing my shitty writing errors.
but on the other way its really confusion if you read a text and next time the text do have a different content. for me its better of a book stay fixed in the same words and the new content goes into a new book. (but i don't like it for my own words because i prever to rework them all the time)

It is just important to know such things, so that I can read phoronix articles in the right way. So thanks for the info - good to know.

yes this is really a problem because most of the phoronix readers don't know this-

michael really should write a disclaimer about that and post it in every article to make sure that the information in the article is only right in the "past"fixed by the date of the aricle.
the information can be wrong 1 minute after releasing the article!...
michael should really make clear that he do not edit his articles to fix the "Future" in the "Past"

so yes i'm happy that i can help you in this tropic.

[tomtomme]

its not my guidline its the micheael/phoronix guideline.

somehow i thought you must be a phoronix-guy having such insight..

michael really should write a disclaimer about that and post it in every article to make sure that the information in the article is only right in the "past"fixed by the date of the aricle.
the information can be wrong 1 minute after releasing the article!...
michael should really make clear that he do not edit his articles to fix the "Future" in the "Past"

A disclaimer would be nice.
Another way can be, not to alter the original text, but only to update him by adding some sentences at the very end under the title "update", "correction", "addition" or so. This way you get consistency and actuality at the same time. There also may be an "update" notification in the main-title.

[Qaridarium]

somehow i thought you must be a phoronix-guy having such insight.

no I'm not bridgmans a spam accound
really no i'm not a insider ! i'm a jon doe user phoroix member.

A disclaimer would be nice.
Another way can be, not to alter the original text, but only to update him by adding some sentences at the very end under the title "update", "correction", "addition" or so. This way you get consistency and actuality at the same time. There also may be an "update" notification in the main-title.

yes i also vote for a disclaimer!

yes "update" many websites do this in this way for example heise.de

but you get more clicks and readers if you push out new articles instead! (this is a fact)