if it wasn’t for the “dev”-bit, I’d be able to confirm that yes, you can use the R9 380 (OCX 4GB, to be precise) w/ linux/debian/ubuntu, because I am doing this right now while I’m typing.
Some minor things are still slightly annoying, e.g. I've connected the HDMI output to my hi-fi receiver for sometimes watching stuff on TV, but if the receivers on, the main screen will be automatically be set to the HDMI output instead of the DVI one, although I tried to configure this several times.
So you have to wait for a moment until the settings for coyping the screen-output to both displays is active and then you have them grafix again.
Maybe the newer/newest driver is better, though when it works, wait until it works, is my mantra…
As someone who has yet to jump on the current generation of games, PC or otherwise, this seems like a good way to do it. VR is not a big selling point.
AMD’s RX480 looks really good especially for the price (2 in SLI are more powerful AND cheaper than a 1080 in some cases?). How about that external GPU situation, guys?
the only generic product still costs $500 for just the dock which is nuts
the problem is that these things need to include their own PSUs and they only exist as high-end products with PCIe drawers and USB hubs and whatnot. if every notebook in the next couple years starts shipping with thunderbolt / USB C then you’ll start seeing the equivalent of chinese SATA caddies, but it seems there’s a way off. there’s a rumour that Apple is going to release a new external 4k/5k display next week which will have a GPU inside of it, which would let you dongle to a VR headset (also, the intel GPUs in macbooks still can’t do 4k on their own otherwise afaik).
it’s very unlikely that this Apple monitor’s GPU would be modular (basically impossible for reasons of form factor alone) but I’d probably buy it if it was!
they shouldn’t have problems with desktop compositing at that resolution at this point either but if Apple does want to push 5k for no reason as a marginal upgrade than that will require an external GPU, as will running games at >1080p.
oh and if I didn’t respond to avoiding AMD: I still wouldn’t run AMD on Linux. they’ve been trying real hard to deprecate their proprietary driver lately and have been putting Intel-levels of effort into the open source driver stack so it’s finally up to OpenGL 4.5 support (almost; http://mesamatrix.net/) but it’s still missing a bunch of optimizations (like a decent shader cache implementation, even though a lot of the proprietary wine wrappers are increasingly starting to incorporate these on their own) that you’ll only find on Nvidia proprietary on Linux (and Intel is still a fine option on Linux because you don’t miss those super high-end optimizations as much and it at least works perfectly out of the box because Intel maintains so much of the mesa stack these days).
hopefully the new $200 AMD card will make the GTX 1060 cheaper than it would’ve been otherwise. I think that’s the one I’d be waiting to buy (to finally upgrade from sandy/ivy-gen iGPU) if I hadn’t gotten a fancy GPU from work (as it stands I’m wondering if I used up the work allotment too soon because of how good the Pascal Titan is likely to be for many many years to come – there’s no process shrink and new DP technology on the horizon the way there was with last year’s top end).
honestly, and I mean it this time – give it another year and it should be good. Intel mesa is a very pleasant and polished experience these days and performance is generally competitive with Windows/OSX; the AMD devs just need to move on to adding optimizations (because this is the kind of thing you really miss at the high end when a Fury on Mesa is only competitive with a GTX 960) now that they’re done adding features and mostly disavowing their old proprietary suite wreck.
of course more people using high-end GPUs on Linux are using them for CUDA rather than gaming so you’re still kind of hamstringing yourself in terms of “works on my machine” if you don’t get with the crowd when you’re joining a relatively small user community, and that’s the bigger issue.
RX 480 reviews are out and the 8GB $240 variant looks to be on par with a 970. Why you wouldn’t just wait until the Zotac 970 hits $250 again I don’t know. VRAM?
Welp, this might be the killing blow for AMD, especially in light of the whole 480 power fiasco (if you haven’t heard: 480s are drawing too much power over the PCIe slot, which has the effect of killing slots and motherboards if it decides it wants more juice).
Mayhaps it is time to ebay the 290 I got off ebay before the price crashes any more
This should be perfect at 1080p. I hope we settle into a plateau of power demands at that resolution like in 2010-2013 so high frame rates come cheap and easy.
I think it’s generally agreed that 1440p/27" is the biggest reasonable desktop display size, but presumably if you want higher pixel density you could fit a 4k/5k profile into that size and just pixel double for games, but it’s almost impossible to objectively justify that cost
old films barely benefit north of 720p though and 1440p is the highest native resolution of almost everything but modern big budget action movies
if I get a 4k TV it’s because I still have a 720p projector and it’s so easy to motivate a two-generation skip
