Recommend a graphics card (£120, linux 64 bit)

With alpha looming it's time to add a graphics card to my pc, currently relying on an intel HD 3000 and it probably wont cut it for PA. Never bought a decent card (and stopped following the market years ago) so need some help not to go too wrong. Criteria:

• Budget of around £120, lets say £100-£140
• If an nvidia and amd card has smilar specs for similar price, go with amd
• Works well on linux 64 bit (mint), don't care if the drivers are proprietary or not
• Runs the PA release version well with dual screens, both 1080p (I'm tempted to say medium settings, whatever that means)
• Don't plan to overclock, I'll stick with whatever settings it comes with
• Bonus points for OpenCL support. Doesn't need to be a powerhouse, just for messing about

There's too much conflicting info about driver issues on linux, seems to be a 50/50 split between which company is worst. The card doesn't need to be future proof, at most it will run PA and emulators for 6th gen consoles. Is 1 gig of GDDR5 enough for PA? More video ram at the same price point probably means less grunt, if PA is fine with 1 gig that seems the optimal choice, correct me if I'm wrong.

With all that in mind it seems 7790 is the chipset to go for? If 7790 is a good choice, which of these do you think is the best? http://www.ebuyer.com/search?sort=relev ... =48&page=1

Stick with nvidia simple as that.
nvidia have fantastic performance under linux, they have consistently maintained ogl compliant. They also keep their drivers upto date (ie in the event of an ABI bump from xorg you don't have to wait months for updated drivers, nvidia actually release compatible drivers prior to official release)

Yes ATi have gotten alot better in the last few years and have made some great improvements over hte last few months partly due to a push via Valve and SOURCE games on linux, but they are still behind the curve
nvidia have soo much stuff its ridiculous

http://www.yoyotech.co.uk/gtx650-2gb-gi ... n650oc-2gi

I couldn't agree more with what eeyrjmr wrote. At home we have 64bit Linux on several machines. Most of them are NVidia and one Intel graphics.

Few years ago I tried ATI (or rather AMD at that point) and it didn't go very well. Although that could have changed with Valve pushing them.

One thing though: when playing DirectX games under wine I always had some weird issues with ATI (transparency issues, flickering, unreadable text). Under NVidia no problems.

EDIT: Don't use HDMI. Its support under Linux to transfer both video and audio is still questionable.

My desktop's card: GTX 560 TI
Laptop: GTM 525 M

Probably in that range, I would suggest:
Nvidia GeForce GTX 660
Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti
(I prefer Evga brand, but there are many good ones from other companies)

I have been using Linux for 15 years, so I have always stuck with Nvidia.
Perhaps another person can recommend an Amd video card.

I'm using AMD cards at moment and have very few issues with them, isn't much more than I got with nvidia. But AMD got performance gap between windows and Linux drivers which is really big (15-30%). Single-GPU Nvidia cards OpenGL performance is the same with Windows or even better.

I agree with all comments before: if you don't care about using open-source driver at all your choice is Nvidia. Nvidia have other great advantage: their driver codebase is shared between all platforms, so if there will be some bugfixes/improvements for windows version of PA they will be applied to linux driver too. It's much more tricky with AMD because they have different developers and different codebase for Linux/Windows drivers.

I can't say anything about PA (i don't think even developers can), but 1GB of VRAM isn't good choice even for old games. Probably it's can be okay for PA (because it's developers rock and game will be well-optimized), but if you want to play any other games it's will be a big problem.

I'm got dual-screen setup and mine 1GB isn't enough for lot of games. So better to get 2GB card at least.

Just adding to the chorus of Nvidia over AMD. I've used both on many versions of 64 bit Ubuntu and Mint, and the Nvidia either works out of the box, or has minor easily fixed issues. My Radeon seems to have constant bizarre issues, so once I get it working I'm hesitant to touch a thing driver-wise. I don't know about the hows and whys of linux video drivers, but Nvidia has been smooth sailing. AMD has been a system buster more than once and upgrading my OS is always iffy and more work than it should be.

Since there are no video card ram requirements on the Steam page for Planetary Annihilation, probably 1+ GB video card ram is plenty.

Usually, the video card ram is used more heavily for lots of textures for games like Crysis.
I don't recall hearing any requirements for RTS or RPG games other than the gpu itself.

VRAM is important when you got multi-screen setup with 3840x1080+ resolution.
Probably RTS couldn't utilize 4GB of VRAM, but 1GB is pretty small VRAM for now.

Not sure if NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT would be an alright card, but I have over 300 gigs at my disposal, I think I can handle PA.

I've been using AMD cards on Linux for 10 years now, and I've never had any major issues with them. I've tried nVidia as well, and in my short experience, I haven't had any major problems with them either.
But as far as I'm concerned, AMD will always be the number one choice for me due to their support for open drivers. Even though they are coming along slowly, they are much more future proof than any closed-source video card, as is evidenced by some open source AMD drivers for older hardware out performing their binary counterparts.

Just to correct this, AMD/ATi support open drivers as much as nvidia do.
AMD/ATi have however provided LIMITED specification for their older cards.
Even with these specifications for their older cards they barely have olg1.4 support let alone GLSL2 ( In know since I have done techsupport for HoN since closed beta and it is those who insist on using the FOSS drivers which still have issues, they also have the arrogance to go along with it demanding S2 lower the ogl req so they can use their opensource drivers....)

FOSS drivers are a nice idea and the main argument that I hear used for them is "the cards are still usable why should by hardware become out of date because some company says". Thing is nvidia support really old cards and keep the drivers up to date. People complain when a card gets "relegated" to the legacy driver but that simply to keep a unified codebase across all the OS's and the newer stuff just does not work (like threaded renderer). Even in legacy the drivers are kept upto date with xorg abi... the 6000series & 7000series from nvidia are now part of the legacy codebase BUT still maintained.

Nobody complain that Nvidia drivers are bad, but we live in real world where any company can go bankrupt, or be acquired by other company who won't care about legacy drivers or about drivers at all.

You know, there is not much companies on the market who support their hardware/devices for long time. I already got small collection of 100% actual working webcams and controllers which doesn't get support for Windows XYZ, and usually they are only 2-3 years old.

I agree but for high-end cards, even medium-end cards there is only closed-source drivers from ATI or nvidia (since ATI don't release those spec's) so arguing over the philosophical nature of to FOSS or not to FOSS when wanting medium to high-end GPU is a moot point.

low-medium to low then sure! FOSS all the way and I would go for an ATI card (or intel) everytime... but such cards will not play the newer games (even concidering dual booting.) that well, if at all.

My point is wanting FOSS drivers and decent gpu are a conflict in ideologies and it simply comes downto what do you want more? right now I want good gaming performance, good drivers, std compliance over the FOSS idology and I naturally update my gpu faster than nvidia's attrition rate into legacy so from my perspective nvidia are supporting.

The type of card (and others in that price range) that the OP posted as a possible ATI card is not support by the FOSS drivers, there are no publically available specs on them and it will not be supported for YEARS to come. What is his natural GPU attrition rate? if he holds onto a GPU for like 5years then sure go ati, he may have basic FOSS support by then, if it is less... why cripple yourself

eeyrjmr, I don't follow the details of the open source graphics development as much as I should, but if I recall correctly, it can be summed up as such:

Since AMD has limited resources to devote to Linux driver development, they don't actively contribute to the development of FOSS drivers for their old cards. Instead, they release the specifications for their old cards that allows open source developers to work on them independently. Several have nearly full functionality, although there are some with features lacking that are still being worked on.

As for newer hardware, AMD has a (small but growing) team that actively helps develop the open-source drivers to support them. These don't have full functionality just yet, as it's a lot of work to implement all the features, and even still, there is some work that needs to be done in Mesa itself to support certain OpenGL features.

However, FOSS drivers for new hardware is definitely being supported. AMD just recently published the open source drivers for their 8000-series hardware, which hasn't even been released yet. The reason for this is that around the time they first started publishing the hardware specifications, they had changed their development workflow in order to move towards feature parity between the Windows drivers and the FOSS Linux drivers. The 8000-series was meant to be the first release developed entirely within this new paradigm, so it's only with this upcoming release that we'll start to see a shift in their FOSS support.

The 8000-series FOSS driver itself supports 2D, OpenGL 3.1, and power management, lacking only in hardware video decoding. Whether the last will be supported is questionable, as it uses licensed technology that AMD doesn't own. However, from what I heard, AMD is working on a solution for it. It may end up being closed-source, but at very least it will plug into the driver system as an individual component more easily than the proprietary graphics driver would integrate into the Linux kernel.

How the 8000-series FOSS driver performs we will have to see when the hardware is released. From what I gather, the hardware is very similar to the 7000-series. While the 7000-series has more than its share of issues on Linux since release, it's starting to reach a point where it's relatively stable, which should bode well for the 8000-series. (Also, please note that the 7000-series was their initial attempt at working within the aforementioned paradigm shift, so problems were to be expected. AMD even admitted that 7000-series FOSS support would lag behind a bit.)

Disclaimer: I decent chunk of what I know comes from Phoronix, who are known for their . . . interesting reporting methods. However, a good portion also comes from their forums, fellow Slackware users, etc. Also, don't only judge the FOSS driver support based on how well it runs on Ubuntu.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature - showing what is "complete" or not even touched.
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonProgram - showing the results are quite mixed

Yes ATI are trying to leverage the FOSS community todo the drivers, that doesn't change the fact that you cannot reliably guarantee the results.

I personally wouldn't risk it be it from ATI binary drivers or FOSS drivers and would rather stick with nvidia for at least a few more years (hopefully when I next upgrade my card it is a reliable option)

Yes, I am aware of both of those links. I was referencing the first when writing my post. But be aware that it doesn't tell the whole story. The only reliable way to know how well it works is to actually try the older hardware out yourself. (Not that I'm suggesting it, of course.) I have several Slackware buddies with old rigs that tend to run FOSS drivers with (relatively) new games just fine.

I myself ran Warsow, Xonotic, and Doom 3 flawlessly on on old 4000-series hardware with FOSS drivers before I bought a new machine. I had to switch to the binary drivers for my 6000-series hardware only because the FOSS drivers at the time didn't support proper power management, so the card fan ran at full speed all the time. This was fixed in a newer FOSS release last year, but I stick with the newest stable release of Slackware (14.0) rather than the latest updates release (the Current repository), so I don't get those fixes until the next version is released. (Even still, I may stick to the binary drivers depending on PA performance. As the chart you linked shows, the 6000-series has a few things left to implement for gaming.)

In any case, I've always had good experiences with the AMD drivers, FOSS or not, and I'd much rather be giving my money to a company that supports the open drivers than not. (Sort of similar to why I would rather give my money to a game developer who is trying to make a game without publisher support and graphics that don't look nearly as sexy as the latest Crysis engine.)

Wow. My preference of amd all things equal is only because they seem to be doing badly and need all the help they can get. As you've made a strong case to go with nvidia, nvidia it is.

I expect it to last until it dies or I do. It would take a groundbreaking game that doesn't run on whatever I get now to upgrade, PA is the only game so far that has fit that criteria; run until dead is a safe bet

Thank you for the responses. I've narrowed it down to Gigabyte 2GB vram 650 or 650 Ti, will probably go with the Ti.