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Latest Comments by Creak
The AMD RX 480 seems to have power issues you may want to be aware of
2 July 2016 at 7:06 pm UTC Likes: 1

I must admit, I've read several articles, but not the one linked by GoL. So I just read it and I agree that the conclusions are far less catastrophic than what I've been used to read. It says that the power consumption isn't that high compared to other cards, and good custom cards that will be sold later should fix the problem by adding a 8-pin connector.

That being said, even in regards to this reading, I'm still disappointed by AMD who advertised a low-power consumption GPU and apparently tried to squeeze the card into this definition by using a 6-pin connector and being just above the limits of the PCIe specs. That is bad PR. It gives the impression that the GPU, although a brand new architecture, has already reached its limits. And it also gives bad press to the cards. It would have been better to have a product a bit less on the edge, at least for the first revisions. Now a lot of users won't even look twice at those cards because of what happened.

Because I really prefer AMD over NVIDIA for several personal reasons, I will continue to follow closely this topic and hope for a brighter tomorrow with the custom cards that seems to be on the way. But if the problems aren't fix by then, I'll be extremely disappointed by AMD.

The AMD RX 480 seems to have power issues you may want to be aware of
2 July 2016 at 5:54 pm UTC

Quoting: dmantioneConsider this a non-issue. Yes the specification is 75W and the card can consume 77W. But a mainboard manufacturer taking only 2 watts of margin into account would be very, very stupid. You can assume safely that any sane mainboard manufacturer designs their board to be capable of delivering more than 75W.

This is mainly bad press for AMD, the amount of situations where it will cause problems will be near zero.
Maybe you're right, but from the benchmarks I've seen it wasn't just 2W above the PCIe specs, it was way more than that.

The PCIe specs says the maximum intensity the card should get from the mobo is 5.5A but, in Battlefield 4, it's up to 6.92A (that's 25% above the specs without overclocking anything!). Other graphics cards can do it simply because they have more than just a 6-pin connector. AMD should have at least an 8-pin connector by default on their RX 480.

Of course it is good if the mobo can handle it, it means that the mobo can behave correctly if you overclock some parts on it. But that's not how standards work! By default, any component should respect the specs. If it is indeed only 2W... then I promise I won't make such a fuss about it, but it doesn't seem so (I mean just read the articles, they don't even want to try overclocking because they're afraid to damage the other components on their test machines).

A good example of manufacturers not respecting the power specs and leading to dangerous products is the bad USB-C cables. That lead to burn your battery, and clearly it's not up to your phone to handle bad USB-C cables.

I really want AMD to do something about it, I really do, because I really want to buy an AMD card. But until a fix is found (whether it's hardware or software), I think it's stupid to buy an RX 480 card.

The AMD RX 480 seems to have power issues you may want to be aware of
2 July 2016 at 1:41 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: swickSo, as usual, well thought out and well researched "journalism" (or rather copy and pasting from "tech" blogs) right there liam!

Oh, and the comments here: always fucking great.
I was pretty optimistic at first about the RX 480, then I saw one article about the PCIe problem. I thought it was just some anti-AMD journalist trying to find every single problems he could find, then I saw other articles relating the same stories and not because they were just copy/pasting from other websites, they were actually testing the cards and seeing the same problem. Then I've seen the Hardware.fr article. I know, it's in French, but this site does excellent, in-depth tests of PC hardware parts. I really deeply trust this site, they've always done very accurate tests and benchmark (maybe you can translate it with Google Translate?). And they also said this problem was concerning. PCIe has standards that aren't here just for fun, the manufacturers have to respeect them in order to have everything going on right. If all the PC components were doing what they want with the standards, it would be a hell of a job to build your own PC! Anyway, they said other NVIDIA cards also had the problem indeed, but it wasn't as important as for the RX 480. They ended up saying that, unless you know your mobo really well, they can't advise you to buy this card for now, because it is too risky for the mobo and the other parts connected to it.

So, what I'm trying to say is that the common sens here tells us that YOU are probably wrong mister, and every one else seems to be right in that case. And you have to deal with that. I also wanted to have a way better card from AMD, but it didn't happen. I'm disappointed, but you don't see me insulting everyone because of that!

I hope AMD will fix the problem, but until I see the fix (and the benchmarks afterwards), you can be sure I won't buy this card. I really don't want to buy an NVIDIA card, but my card is becoming very old by the day. If the problem isn't fixed, I might go green until the Vega GPU are out.

AMD RX 480 released, AMD will possibly open up Radeon Software
1 July 2016 at 2:36 pm UTC

I was expecting a lot from this GPU, but I admit I'm a bit disappointed. I didn't expect the moon, but merely a well built middle-class card, respectful of standards, open source drivers and more or less silent.

And the only part right is the open source drivers...

Edit:
A highly respectable french website, Hardware.fr, reported the problem as well: http://www.hardware.fr/articles/951-9/consommation-efficacite-energetique.html
Their conclusion is not to jump on these cards right now, be careful about the energy problem and hope that third party manufacturers will be able to fix that.

AMD recently communicated about the Vega 10 architecture milestone they've reached. Vega cards are planned for 2017. But I'm a bit tired of waiting for their next big thing and be disappointed yet again...

AMD RX 480 released, AMD will possibly open up Radeon Software
30 June 2016 at 12:27 pm UTC

I don't know if I'll have the will to wait that long, but apparently I'll have to wait until Fedora 25 to have it working OOTB...

That being said, which card manufacturer(s) do you advise? Are there manufacturers that are known to do very good cards without superfluous features? (like "look, we've put 32 Gigs of GDDR5 on this one!"))

Announcing the GamingOnLinux wallpaper competition
29 June 2016 at 1:19 pm UTC

Quoting: ElectricPrismIt's my understanding that after a work is modified beyond a certain point it becomes a derivative work, thus each included image is not in its original form and subjugated to the same limitations for use similar to how anyone can take I think up to 15 second sound clip from a song and include it in their derivative work with no obligation (thus the entire techno genre).

I even considered doing a color mask over all the letters to make it more monochromatic however I love the personality of the color, and the emotionally charged statement to the world "Hey guys, Linux has AAA games!" that's the message I wanted to make.

If you still feel that way I'm sure I could do a rendition entirely from fan art, I'm not sure if it would strike the same emotional cord, in either case my main purpose was accomplished by creating something cool and sharing it with my friends :)

Say - give me the name of 6 different games (I would recommend a Variety of Genres and some AAA) and I'll try on some art under the CC to see if it's hot or not.
You're right, there are some fair use laws about art (I think it's even around 30 seconds of music, but I have no idea for images and video games). But as Liam said, this is a gray area and I guess, since he's not a lawyer, he simply doesn't want to go there ;)

I think the same goes with fan art (although their authors probably won't sue you if you use their work ;)), but if the fan art is under a free license, like CC-BY, I guess it's cool. Since CC-BY requires you to precise the author, you might have to add it at least in the meta data of the image.

About the games I'd like to see on a wallpaper, my main games are Dota2, Cities: Skylines, Broforce and Civilization. But I agree that fan art might not have the same impact as real screenshots... (you can still make your own wallpapers and post them on your own thread in the forum ;))

AMD will be hosting a reddit 'ask me anything' and giving away 14 RX 480 graphics cards
27 June 2016 at 10:54 pm UTC

Quoting: WienerWuerstelI'm still cautiously optimistic but I'm not expecting too much to not get disappointed when the benchmark results are finally here.
Anyhow, the card is only 200 bucks!! :D

AMD will be hosting a reddit 'ask me anything' and giving away 14 RX 480 graphics cards
27 June 2016 at 8:39 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: ShmerlNice. I'll try to participate. Currently Mesa and amgdpu seem to be not ready for RX 480 support in Debian testing. I wonder if they'll get in shape soon. Building mesa from source or figuring out how to make dkms module for amdgpu might be fun, but it's not something I particularly want to spend time on and would prefer a ready solution for it.
I'm also waiting for Fedora to be ready before buying my RX 480. But since Linux 4.7 is needed and it's not yet released, and also that Fedora keeps a buffer of 1 kernel version, I'd say that the 4.7 kernel will be available on Fedora around mid-October/November (2016).

That's a long waiting time :(

And that's just for Fedora, which is pretty quick to adopt new kernel releases. I don't think Debian is as quick to adopt new kernel releases.

Edit:
Would be nice if AMD could take that delay into consideration for their next cards, so that we don't have to wait six months between the possibility to buy the card and the possibility to use it (simply).

Announcing the GamingOnLinux wallpaper competition
27 June 2016 at 12:47 pm UTC

Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: ElectricPrismHere's my entry - I edited my post on page 1 to include it aswell - it's 4k so it should scale to 1080p and 1440p well.



http://imgur.com/6q0nlUR
While I think it is very cool, I wouldn't realistically be able to use it due to the inclusion of art from games. It's a big grey area when it comes to such things. Very cool design though and I'm sure others would love to use it!

Same goes for ~2 others I saw earlier, I can't use art directly from games (unless they have a clear license to expressly allow it somewhere).
I thought so as well. By seeing the other wallpapers with small games screenshots, I wasn't sure if you accepted "fair use" or not ;)

But I admit this wallpaper is gorgeous :D

Announcing the GamingOnLinux wallpaper competition
27 June 2016 at 12:43 pm UTC

Quoting: liamdaweUPDATE

I have updated the initial post to make everything as clear as possible :)
Thanks Liam ;)

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