Quoting: Half-ShotI still don't know where I stand with AMD. I love having a good FOSS driver that is quickly gaining features and preformance, and is actually included with the kernel but AMD themselves need to do more, catalyst is a dead end.

However my AMD processor is still good after 5-6 years, and Intel give me no incentive to shell out my piles of cash.

Catalyst may be a dead end in the long run, but it has served a short-term purpose for some of us. If AMD were able to get good FOSS drivers released with the hardware, I wouldn't bother with catalyst. As it is now, it takes a while for the free drivers to get good, and catalyst is the stop-gap that makes me willing to buy a new radeon card and game with it during the couple years that the free drivers take to become decent.

AMD driver support is definitely worse in the short term but a better long-term solution than nVidia. I've had to deal with old nVidia cards for work before, fighting with both legacy and reverse-engineered drivers, and don't want to mess with that on my own time. In contrast, I just gave my previous gaming machine to a family member, and it is at the point where catalyst was no longer needed for the fresh Mint install. With Intel still not being an option for gaming, I am grateful to have AMD as a choice that is "good enough" for the short term and is even better for the long term.

Speaking of Intel, when my current i7 was brand new last year, I gave a try at gaming with the onboard graphics and it still just wasn't working out (without even trying anything with unusually high graphics demands). Since Intel is the one with piles of cash (not AMD as others pointed out), I wonder if they will ever bother to invest enough to make on-board GPUs competitive with mid-range video cards.

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Quoting: Hamish

Quoting: fedsoThank you for another great review! Even without pictures (they would help breaking the length of the text) these are outstanding articles!

Not quite sure what you mean about not having pictures... I spent quite a bit of time getting the ten screenshots for the review.

It sounds like the preference would be to intersperse them in the text, maybe the screenshots even got overlooked being grouped up high like a banner...

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Excellent review, Hamish. Can't really find a single bit to quibble over ;)

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Quoting: WorMzyIsn't the Arse Technica article just another poorly veiled attempt to scare as many people away from Linux as possible? In their opinion, gaming on Linux is a stupid idea and will never take off, so nobody should even consider it and should just use Windows instead. :|

I wouldn't assume that... they've got a bunch of writers, and no reason to think their biases are all uniform. It looks like this one is open to Linux gaming gaining momentum, at least in the form of SteamBox, and that's why he bothered to try installing SteamOS for the review and bothered to mention poor Linux compatibility as a weakness!

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Anonymousi don't really see wwhy people would hate on amd's processors, their 8350 is an extremely good value for only 10$ more than the i3's, ofc they don't perform as well as the i5's and i7's in single threaded applications, but in stuff like sony vegas with high multicore support it beats the i5's and some i7's, i think everone here, even the haters, know that without amd, and intel and nvidia basically having a monopoly, we would pay at least twice the ammount we pay now, and not getting any speed improvements from both intel and nvidia

It boils down to historical reasons. nVidia got there first ...
(snip comparison of GPUs instead of CPUs)

Read the question again... it's more about Intel vs. AMD on processors, than nVidia vs. AMD on graphics.

I tend to go for AMD on low-cost computers nowadays, and those computers have been lasting a long time for good total value. Also AMD is way better on low-power computers, at least until an upcoming generation of Atoms gets rid of the trashy powervr-based integrated GPUs (GMA 500/600/3600/3650).

Gamers who only purchase high-performance gaming machines might go Intel 100% of the time, but it is likely that even they have benefitted from Intel having some plausible competition, as the original poster said.

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Heads up, open-source crowdfunding fans:

the previously-featured Shattered Time

Quoting: FC#28He's not just open sourcing the game's scripts (which use Unity free). He's open sourcing every asset in the game. The modding potential is absolutely huge, but you can go even beyond that. You can take any of the art he creates in this game and put them into your own, unrelated project.

http://gamingonlinux.com/articles/the-funding-crowd-28-feb-12th23rd.3147/article_page=3 [External Link]

has been relaunched as Chronicles of the Rift
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/90524059/chronicles-of-the-rift/ [External Link]

This time, focus is on getting the game engine needed for Shattered Time going, postponing the creation of actual game assets for a future campaign

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I showed this one to a coworker who is known for rigging up things to make it work, told him he needs this one :D

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Do new citizens start wandering through your town when your population increases past the max town hall requirement of 1600? It's hard to keep track of whether new ones appear when you have so many wandering around, but I think some new ones moved in...

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Quoting: Anonymoustoo bad they dropped support for the majority of some of their not-so-old "Legacy" graphics cards completely

Which ones, 4000 series? I've heard the free driver works really well with those now, so Catalyst doesn't really seem needed.

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: SpeedsterAlso is FOOS a new acronym I'm not aware of, or just a typo for FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)?

Yep! FOOS is for Free and Open Source.

Interesting, what's the second 'O' stand for?

Oops just saw followup, guess it is typo after all, probably one of those things where your fingers just prefer to do the wrong thing -- I get that with programming variables that other people pick sometimes ;)

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