Radeon HD 7950 vs. GeForce GTX 680 On Linux

[Qaridarium]

Yeah maybe we don't need that kind of power on Linux... or Windows.... I for one think it's great that we can still get the info. BTW am I the only one who can't wait for AMD To stuff a 7950 into a APU?

no you are not the only one i also wait for this. because then you do have unlimited VRAM because a hd7950 class hardware share the same 64bit ram adresses than the "CPU"

right now with VLIW 5D and the new one VLIW4D the VRAM from the APU is exklusiv for the GPU means it just blocks the RAM and its limited to the blocked part of the ram.

this will be the biggest improvement with the new architecture of the hd7970 in the APU in 2013.

[AlbertP]

You're right this time, Q. The APU's 3D cores are usually one generation behind. APU's with "6xxx" graphics in fact had an Evergreen (5xxx) based design, while the new Trinity marketed as 7xxx is in fact a Northern Islands (6xxx) based design. The display core however is not outdated in the Trinity APU (http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature#...splay_Hardware).

[Tuxee]

What's the point of buying those cards if most GPU intensive games are 2-5 years of age?(X3 Reunion, ETQW, Heroes of Newerth, Oilrush)

IIRC Oil Rush came out a few months ago. And IIRC Unigine is supposed to be a state-of-the-art 3D engine.

[johnc]

This one's a bit of a head-scratcher.

The benchmarks done on other sites seemed to indicate that the 680 clearly performed better.

[chithanh]

This is a nice review. I hope that we will see triple-monitor benchmarks from Phoronix one day.

@johnc
NVidia gives you faster performance on Windows. But that is partly due to their dynamic overclocking "GPU Boost", and at least their overclocking support on Linux used to be inferior to the Windows support.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Phoronix compared retail cards. French site hardware.fr compared cards intended for reviewers and for retail from Nvidia, and found that the press sample was between 1.5 and 5% faster than the retail sample.

[curaga]

Yep, quite interesting that the results are the other way around compared to Windows.

[Kano]

Interesting are the heaven results, should be compared against dx11 and opengl4 on win...

[zoomblab]

This is not a proper test. Either put a 7970 against a 680 or a 7950 against 670.

[Qaridarium]

You're right this time, Q. The APU's 3D cores are usually one generation behind. APU's with "6xxx" graphics in fact had an Evergreen (5xxx) based design, while the new Trinity marketed as 7xxx is in fact a Northern Islands (6xxx) based design. The display core however is not outdated in the Trinity APU (http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature#...splay_Hardware).

hey yo know i have to much time to get all that stuff

anyway trinity is a lame duck for linux opensource support
because no HDMI support right now and no OpenCL support right now and "BAD means outdated" VLIW and bad defaults of gpu clock speed means slow and bad power manegment........

for a opensource user i recommend hd7750+ hardware because the new architecture do in fact get more support from amd
also the APU the opensource people waiting for are the NEXT one not the "trinity" one because of the 64bit memory managment with the same addressspace than the CPU. this means the linux kernel can use the VRAM from the GPU as RAM for CPU "tasks" and the other way arround

also the new video engine "VCE" will be the one with Open-Source support and all UVD customers will be "Losers" because they will never get opensource support

right now "Llano" and "Trinity" the amd APUs doesn't make sense for opensource users at all

in my point of view this is a failure of the AMD-Opensource-managment (Bridgman)

i can understand every "Intel Core i7-3770" customer because they get a APU with "Video acceleration support" and a working "Power-managment" and high performance "default"

in 2013 amd will have the same but right now they just want to sell a high planed obsolescence rate with the name catalyst by dropping catalyst driver support for old drivers to burn your money away.

and then in 2013 bridgman will claim this as his "victory" in improving the opensource support but his moves are very trivial a hamster would do the same for food.

[benjamin545]

if i was bridgeman i would even ever respond to any forum post Q has been in. its like, whats the point.