Descent Prequel

[Monkey]

/start rant

Nvidia are actively against open source graphics driver development while AMD are not. I know that sinewav will, certainly for now, be using the proprietary drivers for gaming, however, I had to state this point. There are many reasons why open source drivers are more desirable than proprietary ones.

* * * Support AMD not Nvidia and one day the open source drivers will be better than the proprietary ones * * *

/end of rant

[sinewav]

* * * Support AMD not Nvidia and one day the open source drivers will be better than the proprietary ones * * *

Intel finally has dedicated support for their graphics chips, but can any of their mobile chipsets run Unity or Unreal halfway decent?

[Light]

My computer is too old to play the Overload teaser. I'm saving money for a new system, but I'm really thinking I want to try putting together a Ubuntu gaming laptop. Any experience with such things? I imagine the solution revolves around video card support. Is Nvidia still the best option?

I've been using AMD for years now and have yet to have an issue. For the past 2ish years I've been using an R9 280x and haven't had a single problem with it. Before that was a shitty HD 6850, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone, but it still ran most things well given I didn't hit max settings.

As of a few years ago, there's not a huge difference between what you choose as far as quality of gaming goes. You may get slightly better with Nvidia still, but I don't think you would regret going AMD either. Personal preference between the two would be your best decision maker. Although, AMD comes a bit ahead when it comes to processing power the last I checked, but it's possible that has changed as well. That's actually the main reason I had 2 R9 280x's in my computer, but have since sold one.

I may go into their Fury cards for my next upgrade. Way to make my 280x look pathetic.
http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-R9-FURY- ... on-R9-280X

[Z-Man]

As far as I know, if performance is your concern, nowadays you're not making an automatic mistake for going with ATI on Linux. I've personally only used NVidia (well, and 3dfx) and never ran into problems caused by the closed-sourceness of their drivers. Even though I was running old hardware and the often cited theoretical danger of closed source drivers is WHAT IF THE MANUFACTURER DECIDES TO DROP SUPPORT FOR YOUR CARD? That said, I'm considering switching to ATI the next time around for two reasons: a) Their sort of false advertising of the 970 with its crippled 500 MB memory block (haven't seen any practical problems yet, mind) and b) The fact that my current laptop's CPU died an engineering failure heat death (resurrected it as a zombie, expecting it to completely stop working in a month or three).

I haven't actually got any experience with proper gaming laptops. I always just shopped with the desire to maybe play the one or other older or less demanding game. Proper gaming laptops are just not worth it, I prefer having a proper tower where I can switch out the GPU after two or three years for the real gaming. For my personal purposes, the Intel integrated GPUs of Skylake CPUs would suffice performance wise. It's just a shame that their drivers are crash happy.

Oh, and funded with about two hours left on the clock. Phew.

[Monkey]

Intel finally has dedicated support for their graphics chips, but can any of their mobile chipsets run Unity or Unreal halfway decent?

I don't know that much about Intel's graphics hardware or its drivers but, the last time I looked into things, neither were in the same league as Nvidia's or AMD's; Intel graphics was the poor man's option.

The open source world is still growing. Admittedly, it will take a little time before open source graphics drivers match closed source ones but it will happen. Open source software is even working it's way into proprietary software. OS X uses some software from FreeBSD as well as other sources. Windows uses some of OpenBSD's software and code and Microsoft has even just started donating money for this! Shocked? Me too.

[pike]

My computer is too old to play the Overload teaser. I'm saving money for a new system, but I'm really thinking I want to try putting together a Ubuntu gaming laptop. Any experience with such things?

I don't know much about laptops, but if you're on a tight budget maybe custom built desktop PC will be a better option? There's much more options to choose from and most of them, except maybe PSU and HDD may be second hand. I'm currently in process of completing a small htpc based on old 775 socket with integrated Intel graphics for movies and playing arma and all of the parts are used. This week I bought mini ITX motherboard on ebay and got free CPU inside (pretty good too, so that's 15 bucks saved).

If I had to build a gaming PC on a budget I would look at AMD CPUs with integrated graphics, I think some A10 are comparable to R7 250x, that should run Overload easily. I have R9 270x and the demo/teaser runs constantly at 60fps in 1080p with max settings.

[Word]

I have a Dell Laptop with AMD/Intel (crossfire), and I can't really update to Windows 8.1 because my laptop won't shut down properly anymore once I do that. There are some complicated ways to fix this (which apparently work for a minority of the people who look it up at all), like completely de-installing the graphics drivers, then updating and installing the newest ones, but I never managed to do that without completely messing my screen drivers up so I had to use system recovery in order to see anything again. I know that the problem is related to the AMD driver, but I think Dell is the faulty party here because they never really fixed this and their automatic update system regularly runs into conflicts with that of all other software. So I'd still recommend Nvidia and AMD, but not in combination with Dell. When my parents asked me to pick a laptop for each of my sisters, I just got them both an ASUS with AMD/Nvidia respectively and they don't have any problem.

My laptop is fast and stable, but I had to change the registry so I'm not constantly reminded of upgrading to 8.1/Windows 10 and I'd feel a little better if I had that option when it's there.


edit: Today I saw I could update to Windows 10 without installing 8.1 first, so I did that. Everything works fine. Hahahaha.