gpu advice

[Enverex]

I've tried to use the official ATi drivers in the past, it was a nightmare. They were slow to support their own hardware, they drop support for it relatively quickly (the HD 4000 series are no-longer supported) and they are very slow to update compatibility with new kernels and XOrg versions, so chances are if you're on a rolling distro and a new Kernel or XOrg version comes out, it'll break the Catalyst driver. Nightmare.

What makes this even more of a pain is that ATi have the best cards for smaller boxes and general price/performance (try finding cards comparable to the best fanless/half-height ATi cards in nVidia's range, they don't exist).

[gregory]

gregory, thanks saw your reply after I wrote mine. So you're saying nvidia usually work a bit better with GSdx? What do you mean with "doesn't translate"?

GSdx opengl isn't finished and does't fully work. Result are better on nvidia side but are far from perfect.

I've tried to use the official ATi drivers in the past, it was a nightmare. They were slow to support their own hardware, they drop support for it relatively quickly (the HD 4000 series are no-longer supported) and they are very slow to update compatibility with new kernels and XOrg versions, so chances are if you're on a rolling distro and a new Kernel or XOrg version comes out, it'll break the Catalyst driver. Nightmare.

They still provide driver for HD4000 (was released this year). Get a new driver every month that is only a bump of the version number is kinda useless.
May I suggest that your rolling distro is bad. They can easily patch the driver to build with recent kernel. Patches are on google They also need to block the upgrade of Xorg when Catalyst isn't ready (by the way you probably don't need latest xorg).

radeom 7xxx driver is literally that bad. it causes way too many crashes making gsdx completely unusable on linux pcsx2.

HD[5-7]xxx are bad with GSdx hardware renderer now I don't remember if the SW renderer is working now on HD7000.

[DaTankAC]

i have been fine with 3.8 kernel using catalyst driver from ubuntu repos. but in that case everything updates together so as to hopefully prevent the black screen from a messed up x.

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thanks to your excellent update to ppa version number sw renderer is working again, but not hw mode.

[DaTankAC]

also to add, hw mode does not produce useless black screen but just crashes similar to problem back in last october.

[gregory]

Yes I know for the HW mode. A bug will be fixed in a future driver release (don't know which one). Unfortunately I'm afraid it will crash later....

[DaTankAC]

maybe nvidia is better choice then for now.

[DaTankAC]

also, is hw mode working for nvidia cards? if so, which series would be best choice then?

[gregory]

Disclamer I got only report from other users. As far as I know, they don't get a crash every 5 minutes and can render most of the screen. There are still bug in my opengl code. To help to debug it, I'm hopping the opensource driver will catch up some missing features. In parallal I port my code to Windows.

[petran79]

I use an Nvidia GT660 with drivers from Nvidia's site (310)
not that PCSX2 wouldnt work with open source drivers, but they had some problems that annoyed me (eg horizontal tearing line during videoplayback in SMplayer, but in that case it corrupted the picture instead of being vsync related)

notice though that compared to Windows, performance drops in some games.
Unless its a card below Intel 3000 specifications, most games will run fine regardless of the GPU.

It has more to do with stability than performance.

OpenGL HW mode works now but most games are unplayable due to corrupted graphics and black screen. But at least its a step forward. A few versions before PCSX2 always crashed with HW acceleration on.
But there is no gain in speed for the few games that work.