NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti with Maxwell GPU in February

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Supposedly it is between a GTX660 and GTX760 in performance and is 28NM:

http://videocardz.com/48726/nvidia-g...l-gpu-february

[The Hand]

I was expecting Maxwell in March, looks like a good performer. AMD gpu price cuts might be coming sooner rather than later.

[kalniel]

I was expecting Maxwell in March, looks like a good performer.

This opinion is based on what exactly?

[The Hand]

I was going to have put the word "potentially" in there, but no one expects the spanish inquisition as they say. The pricing will be the key factor with a mid range card, and so might trigger AMD to cut their mid-range gpu prices.

[Willzzz]

Not leading with the high end this time?

[DanceswithUnix]

Nice, my GTX460 is getting rather long in the tooth, and after some shenanigans at the weekend with the Linux AMD driver I think I will be going Nvidia yet again for my next purchase.

[Biscuit]

Yeah i didn't have too much fun with the AMD linux driver last time i had a go with it

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Performance numbers leaked:

http://www.techpowerup.com/197038/ge...mbers-out.html

It is slower than a GTX660 it seems.

[kalniel]

Performance numbers leaked:

http://www.techpowerup.com/197038/ge...mbers-out.html

It is slower than a GTX660 it seems.

Should be a replacement for the 650ti with better perf/[watt|die]. Though obviously incremental gains as same process. Probably quite similar to AMDs recent round of releases where GCN1.1 doesn't give huge increases across the board, but they've addressed some of the weak points.

[DanceswithUnix]

Yeah i didn't have too much fun with the AMD linux driver last time i had a go with it

It was almost farcical . I installed fedora 20 on a machine built from old parts lying around. One of the parts lying around was an HD4670, so that went in the build, and once I had installed everything I went to switch from the open source to the ATI video driver as it should be easy to do.

There is no RPM for the catalyst driver for Fedora 20. The old package maintainer has been doing the job for the last couple of years despite no longer owning an ATI card and hence not being able to properly test, but no-one wants to step forward and take it over. It sounds like no-one wants to take up the job because it is a pain in the butt. Quite reasonably he decided was enough is enough and he has done his part, but with no-one to hand over to the package is orphaned and hence removed.

So I went to look at downloading the driver directly from AMD, not a recommended route but given the nature of this machine I can live with that. But it seems that the 4670 isn't supported by Catalyst any more, it is now supported by "Catalyst legacy" which is a year old. That driver doesn't support recent X servers, and some code such as Gnome.

So my take home message was: AMD Linux drivers are still badly enough supported that on-one wants to touch them, and if your card is dumped into the Legacy range then give up.

Yeah the HD4670 is old now, but what worries me is that it is VLIW5 and ISTR that the Brazos E350 in my laptop is also VLIW5 so when does the screen go dark on that then, as it really doesn't have enough grunt to afford to lose 50% of the performance to the open source driver.

Performance numbers leaked:

http://www.techpowerup.com/197038/ge...mbers-out.html

It is slower than a GTX660 it seems.

That is still nearly twice the performance of my GTX460 which is just about coping enough that I can't justify £130 on a 660, but if this is under £100 then I may be tempted.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It was almost farcical . I installed fedora 20 on a machine built from old parts lying around. One of the parts lying around was an HD4670, so that went in the build, and once I had installed everything I went to switch from the open source to the ATI video driver as it should be easy to do.

There is no RPM for the catalyst driver for Fedora 20. The old package maintainer has been doing the job for the last couple of years despite no longer owning an ATI card and hence not being able to properly test, but no-one wants to step forward and take it over. It sounds like no-one wants to take up the job because it is a pain in the butt. Quite reasonably he decided was enough is enough and he has done his part, but with no-one to hand over to the package is orphaned and hence removed.

So I went to look at downloading the driver directly from AMD, not a recommended route but given the nature of this machine I can live with that. But it seems that the 4670 isn't supported by Catalyst any more, it is now supported by "Catalyst legacy" which is a year old. That driver doesn't support recent X servers, and some code such as Gnome.

So my take home message was: AMD Linux drivers are still badly enough supported that on-one wants to touch them, and if your card is dumped into the Legacy range then give up.

Yeah the HD4670 is old now, but what worries me is that it is VLIW5 and ISTR that the Brazos E350 in my laptop is also VLIW5 so when does the screen go dark on that then, as it really doesn't have enough grunt to afford to lose 50% of the performance to the open source driver.

So you are basing your experience of AMD drivers on a 5+ year old card??

My mate had the same issue with Ubuntu and I sold him a new HD6450 for £13. It has better video playback capabilities anyway and consumes far less power,and its much better for such usage than a 5+ year old HD4670.

Moreover,Nvidia drivers are not some level of paragon ability. The 320 branch was entirely crap for me under Windows 7,and my other system has a 9300 IGP in a Zotac motherboard,which had no Windows 8 drivers at launch in late 2012,despite just being over three years old. It meant that I had some graphical weirdness on and off since I had to use a Windows 7 driver.

[kalniel]

So you are basing your experience of AMD drivers on a 5+ year old card??

Well at least they should have had plenty of time to get the drivers sorted then

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Well at least they should have had plenty of time to get the drivers sorted then

Well it took Nvidia long enough for the IGP!

[DanceswithUnix]

So you are basing your experience of AMD drivers on a 5+ year old card??

Absolutely not. It wasn't the fact that the card isn't supported, it was the fact that even a new card would not have been easy to set up as no-one wants to deal with AMD. I thought things were supposed to be improving in that respect.

This is Fedora we are talking about here, the technology playground that feeds into RedHat which powers the majority of server rooms worldwide. That's kind of important market if they want people doing GPU compute with their cards.

As for Nvidia support, in terms of hardware it is about the same. My old 8800GT would be an easy slot in and use, just activate the rpmfusion repos to say you have no ideological problem with closed source software and "yum install kmod-nvidia" (from memory, it has been a while). However, my nForce 430 chipset motherboard in my old home server is no longer supported in the Nvidia driver. So that is about a 5 year cutoff.

I don't think Windows support is relevant here. Different usage, different hardware lifecycle. I expect months between reboots, years between power cycles, maybe leave a machine running for 3 to 5 years with minimal intervention.

[scaryjim]

... This is Fedora we are talking about here, the technology playground that feeds into RedHat ...

Perhaps AMD are concentrating on LTS solutions first? Presumably their primary focus will be SteamOS. Just because things aren't improving for you doesn't mean they're not improving. It's not like fragmentation is an unknown problem in *n?x land. That said, I'm kind of sad that AMD haven't gone proactive on the open source linux driver since SteamOS was announced - would've been a good way to demonstrate their openness and they could definitely be doing more. OTOH, if Linux users care about having a choice of hardware vendors, they could always complete the Linux Crew driver survey and give AMD some feedback...

... I expect months between reboots, years between power cycles, maybe leave a machine running for 3 to 5 years with minimal intervention.

Then perhaps your problem isn't AMD's linux support, but their desktop card support? I may be reading you wrong, but it sounds like you're expecting a level of support for a particular card on Linux that you wouldn't expect on Windows. If your usage and hardware lifecycles are different, why use the same hardware...?

[DanceswithUnix]

... It has better video playback capabilities anyway and consumes far less power,and its much better for such usage than a 5+ year old HD4670.

A further post because it might give you a giggle. Here was the use case that drove my trying to install the catalyst drivers...

The PC is at the back of the garage, on top of the desk, and my fingers were cold. I figured "If I plug in that 4670 and run a litecoin miner, it should blow a gentle 70W breeze over my fingers. Much better than using the fan heater as I don't want to heat the whole garage."

Given that won't work, I shall pull the card and drop back to the motherboard graphics, and try and find some gloves with holes for the fingers