Windows or Linux

[ShadowFlash]

With radeon he'll get a HUGE performance drop in windows too in some games and not only in Dolphin.
My wife used to play Ragnarok Online with 2011 radeon card (don't remember exact model, we sold that laptop).
In same place GeForce 6600 + wine had full speed, radeon had 1-2fps. They still can't make good drivers.
With nVidia everything is fine. And not even close to 100% difference in performance between linux and windows. 2-4 fps at max and sometimes linux build is faster.

PCSX2 - GSDx software runs just fine, OGL plugins yeah, broken. And yeah it's much worse in terms of compatibility than Dolphin so i prefer to use real hardware.

A bit of offtopic - PC version of Jet Set Radio runs WAY faster and smoother in CrossOver in Kubuntu than in windows. Same with NiGHTS into Dreams... Oops...

[Starscream]

(03-05-2013, 07:58 AM)ShadowFlash Wrote: With radeon he'll get a HUGE performance drop in windows too in some games and not only in Dolphin.

"With Radeon"? What does that mean? You are aware that there are hundreds of video cards and GPUs under that name? Having one crappy GPU doesn't mean they're all crappy. Please start making some sense and not generalizing so much. By your logic I could say "I bought a car once and it didn't run well, so don't buy any more cars", when the real answer is to not buy any more crappy cars.

(03-05-2013, 07:58 AM)ShadowFlash Wrote: My wife used to play Ragnarok Online with 2011 radeon card (don't remember exact model, we sold that laptop).

"A 2011 Radeon"? What does that mean? See my response above. Please try to make sure you know what you're talking about before getting involved in conversations like these.

[Grippen]

And also some games run better in Nvidia cards other games in ATI cards depends on where the developers put more focus on plus I find portable graphic cards a bad reference when discussing game performance. With some rare exceptions I would never make a portable a gaming machine but I respect the options others take.

[Shonumi]

(03-05-2013, 07:46 AM)delroth Wrote: Intel has no closed source graphics drivers and Catalyst has issues with corrupted textures in Dolphin. You can't seriously use something that unreliable when trying to debug stuff, so I'm using the free radeon driver. I wouldn't consider the proprietary Catalyst driver usable with Dolphin.

My last comment was aimed at your Radeon not the Intel IGP. I've had some experience with drivers for a few Intel IGPs (GMA X3100, G33/31, Intel HD 3000) on both Windows and Linux. I wouldn't call OSS drivers for Intel bad, but they're sucking less than they used to in terms of performance. I'm not a Dolphin dev, so by all means, use whatever is the most accurate for debugging (for all of our sakes) but I've seen a couple Gentoo/Radeon users here that get along with Dolphin fine. Of course, they're probably not playing the games you're playing under the same conditions, but it works for them. But as I said, that's what you get for not using Nvidia.

@ShadowFlash - Yeah, Gsdx software runs fine for a handful of games for me, though on some games it's terribly slow in other (Tales of Legendia, for example). Some good news is that the hardware mode on the latest revisions works pretty well. Even around the 1.0.0 release, hardware acceleration in GSdx on Linux wouldn't display anything but a black screen on a number of games. After some testing, looks like games like Star Ocean 3 are running just fine. The only thing it needs is a working custom resolution. It's still experimental, but nice to know it hasn't been abandoned.

[ShadowFlash]

Quote:"With Radeon"? What does that mean? You are aware that there are hundreds of video cards and GPUs under that name? Having one crappy GPU doesn't mean they're all crappy. Please start making some sense and not generalizing so much. By your logic I could say "I bought a car once and it didn't run well, so don't buy any more cars", when the real answer is to not buy any more crappy cars.

Any Radeon. From slow and outdated HD4330 to the latest most power beast - there's more than 30 games with serious performance issues. It's not hardware but drivers. In fact there were a few bugs in 2D rendering that lasted since Rage II+ time till late 2010. And some bugs are still here.

[Starscream]

Can you name all of the Radeon video cards you've owned and talk about all of the games that have issues with them? Try to keep your comments to recent stuff, like HD5xxx and newer if you would.

[ShadowFlash]

Like i said same issues on HD4330 and HD7970. Massive slowdowns in online game that uses very old DirectX 6 or 7 engine. Also i had gfx bugs in Sonic Generations and a some slowdowns in Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams. Well, if you try to run Type X2 version of King of Fighters MI:RA you'll get BSOD after character select. Ok it's arcade game designed for some specific hardware combination. But... That revision of Type X2 had Radeon X1600Pro installed. And if game crashes video driver it means that driver is bad. And when i googled for BSOD code and dll name i got a lot of pages with same issue in at least 10 PC games.
I think there's no point in talking about early radeon cards - thing is they still can't make good drivers. Hardware is OK, drivers - windows drivers aren't good enough, linux drivers suck.

[NaturalViolence]

Add Kotor I to that list. I used to frequent the kotor section of the bioware forums a few years ago and we would get people with modern high end amd graphics cards having severe performance issues (and sometimes crashes) all the time. And it was only ever AMD users. Keep in mind that this is a game from 2003 so something like an HD 4870 should be able to handle it quite easily. It was kind of sad to watch but all we could tell them to do was either try to run it through WINE on linux or switch to an Nvidia card. And if they were a laptop user then they were really screwed. The fact of the matter is like ShadowFlash said their drivers have a really bad track record with older games, emulators, and Linux/MACOSX support. Even now. I know this is unpopular to say and painful for some AMD users to hear but the fact remains that if you want good universal reliability you need an Nvidia card. AMD is ok if you're contempt with support for popular/modern applications, OS, and APIs. I would not recommend dolphin on linux if you have an AMD card unless you test it very thoroughly first. Their linux drivers are very hit or miss. Some users complain about graphics issues up the wazzo while others have no problems at all (though this could easily be due to simply not having tested enough games/settings).

[Delayline]

If you going to build a new PC and install the Linux distro on it nVidia is the right choice. About the performance Dolphin works very well with OpenGL backend but PCSX2 is not, PCSX2 only works with DX9/11.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenGL_and_Direct3D
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/