Radeon graphics - Yea or Nay?

[Guest Space Cowboy]

Ladies and gentlemen,

By the way thanks admin and everyone for the BB upgrade. Looking slick. 

OK I am looking at laptops for my 9 year old son for Christmas. He is into KSP, Minecraft, and is starting to use UNITY.

My question is what do people think of laptops using RADEON graphics acceleration. I am way behind the power curve but last I hear Radeon was a no go basically.

 

Thanks!

[TK421d]

radeon is fine.  dont get caught up in brand wars.

im still using a olderish r9-270x and every thing i throw at it runs perfectly on any settings i want.  even brand new fallout 4 runs ultra right off the bat at 60 frames.

[ThePULSAR]

Amd made bad graphic card after 7970

[Guest Space Cowboy]

Here's the model: 

AMD Quad-Core A8-6410 Processor with integrated AMD Radeon R5 graphics, HDMI output

[Majorjim!]

AMD is loosing big time against Nvidia. They have been for years. Personally I also wouldn't waste money on an underpowered laptop.

 You will get much more for your money with a desktop. Much more.

Edited December 1, 2015 by Majorjim

[Guest Space Cowboy]

This computer will be a laptop

[radonek]

One con I can tell: radeon hardware is major trouble under linux. Now, if it were usual case of "need more mods", I wouldn't care. But youngster, yet unspoiled by windows, playing two games that actually work better under linux… I'd say its worth giving it a thought.

[Majorjim!]

Just now, Space Cowboy said:

This computer will be a laptop

Why may I ask must it be a laptop?

[Mat2ch]

45 minutes ago, radonek said:

One con I can tell: radeon hardware is major trouble under linux. Now, if it were usual case of "need more mods", I wouldn't care. But youngster, yet unspoiled by windows, playing two games that actually work better under linux… I'd say its worth giving it a thought.

Uhm, I've got an AMD card and I'm running linux. You just should use the free drivers... but AMD could really speed up their opensource linux driver dev a little. I hoped for OpenGL 4.5 support before christmas.

[moogoob]

ATI was great when it was... well... still ATI. They were headquartered just outside my home city!  I owned nothing but ATI cards (Radeon 9800 pro for the win - bought it for Doom 3) after 3dfx went bust (It was ancient but I loved my Voodoo 3, and the Voodoo 2 basically created the 3d video card market), until AMD bought them out.

Now it's NVidia for me. *shrugs*. Heck, they bought the best of 3dfx's features anyways.

[Alshain]

I have never, ever had a good experience with an ATI card before or after AMD.  It all comes down to driver stability and they have always been awful in comparison to Nvidia.

Edited December 1, 2015 by Alshain

[Lord Aurelius]

I'm not a big fan of ATI cards, especially in laptops. Their power efficiency leaves a lot to be desired (not only hurts battery life, but also the longevity of the machine due to excess heat), in addition to the aforementioned driver issues.

Not to mention that the APU in the laptop you linked is weak on the CPU side, and games like KSP and Minecraft tend to be CPU limited.

If you're wanting a relatively inexpensive machine, I would actually recommend something with an Intel CPU and integrated graphics. The newer chips have surprisingly powerful graphics (at least compared to the older chips) and can run relatively recent games without issue so long as you don't turn up the resolution or detail levels too high. Make sure to get a larger machine with a 45W CPU to maximize your performance.

If you have the budget for it, there's also a few decent entry level gaming laptops: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9812/best-gaming-laptops

Edited December 1, 2015 by Lord Aurelius

[Guest Space Cowboy]

1 hour ago, moogoob said:

 and the Voodoo 2 basically created the 3d video card market

I still have my two PCI Voodoo2's

2 hours ago, Majorjim said:

Why may I ask must it be a laptop?

Portability

 

Ok it is a 2015 Lenovo D50 with the following processing:

• AMD Quad-Core A8-6410 Processor with integrated AMD Radeon R5 graphics, HDMI output

I did see a Youtube running Minecraft at 28-30FPS, so I pulled the trigger. I know Minecraft and Unity are apples and oranges but I'm going for it.

Price:$347.74

Edited December 1, 2015 by Space Cowboy

[Slam_Jones]

3 hours ago, Alshain said:

I have never, ever had a good experience with an ATI card before or after AMD.  It all comes down to driver stability and they have always been awful in comparison to Nvidia.

 

Interesting, because I've never, ever had a bad experience with ATI or AMD in general.  No issues of driver stability, ever.  If AMD really is the "bad" choice, then Intel must literally never have issues, as that'd be the only way it'd be more stable than AMD (in my experience of running an entirely AMD system for 5 years).  Sure, Intel has much, MUCH higher top end (AMD CPUs top out at the FX-9590, a ridiculous CPU that takes 220W and is equivalent to an i5, while Intel has $1,000+ CPUs available that are both faster and use half as much wattage) but I honestly can't understand all the criticism of AMD.

Always be wary of someone who dismisses an entire brand in two sentences.

Edited December 1, 2015 by Slam_Jones
Clarification

[Alshain]

8 minutes ago, Slam_Jones said:

 

Interesting, because I've never, ever had a bad experience with ATI or AMD in general.  No issues of driver stability, ever.  If AMD really is the "bad" choice, then Intel must literally never have issues, as that'd be the only way it'd be more stable than AMD (in my experience of running an entirely AMD system for 5 years).  Sure, Intel has much, MUCH higher top end (AMD CPUs top out at the FX-9590, a ridiculous CPU that takes 220W and is equivalent to an i5, while Intel has $1,000+ CPUs available that are both faster and use less wattage) but I honestly can't understand all the criticism of AMD.

Always be wary of someone who dismisses an entire brand in two sentences.

Intel has tons of issues with their graphics, Nvidia does not.  I would certainly pick ATI before Intel, but why suffer through either?  Very very rarely do I have issues with Nvidia and when I do it's more to do with the card manufacturer than the chip manufacturer.  Nvidia card manufacturers are plentiful. 

Edited December 1, 2015 by Alshain

[Elthy]

The complaints about issues with AMDs drivers are old, and not right anymore, please stop telling this. With the recent release of Crimson the driver software got better than Nvidias, especialy in the UI and speed (of the UI). (I know, there was a small issue with the fan speed on >1% of the crads, but that got solved quickly and Nvidia had an identical issue a while ago, too.)

At the moment the middle class of desktop GPUs better on AMDs side, both the 380(X) and the 390 offer more performance per buck than their Nvidia counterparts.

 

Regarding the Laptop: This thing is awfully weak, try to spend more money (if he is starting to program in Unity its an investment in his future!) and get one of the better APUs from AMD or an Intel CPU with a dedicated GPU. He wont have fun on that, KSP will struggle even with few parts and minecraft wont run well, too.

[Guest]

As far as running games on laptops, like Elthy mentioned already, the big thing is dedicated GPU. Look for a laptop with a dedicated GPU. If all you have is integrated, it will not run 3d applications effectively and will be very,very laggy. Manufacturer doesn't matter so much. Yeah, there are pros and cons with each manufacturer, but they are insignificant compared to integrated vs dedicated. Now, there will be some minor annoyances with a laptop that has a separate dedicated GPU. Most all of the ones I've seen, have both a integrated and dedicated chip, that each go out the same port. So, as long as you play on the laptops built in screen, no big deal, just right click and check which GPU is default. But, when you try to connect an external monitor, like a high-def tv, with the HDMI, you start having issues with dual monitor setups and screen resolutions. Can lead to some headaches, bigger or smaller depending on OS, all of which can be worked around, but still, somewhat aggravating. I have personally bought two refurbished laptops, one for me and one for mom, with dedicated nvidia GPU's, and they work just fine with KSP. You can usually find these refurbished laptops for less than $500. Just make sure to have at least 8gb ram, any less than that and you will have to spend time culling background processes every time you want to play a game.

[Elthy]

Dont be so hard on integrated GPUs, they got quite good in the recent days. There are several often used dedicated Nvidia GPUs that get outperformed by some integrated GPUs, e.g. the 605m or even the 630m. Good examples for good integrated graphics is AMDs Carrizo or Intels Iris Graphis, which are sadly very expensive.

[cantab]

"Radeon" is just AMD's graphics brand. Any laptop with an AMD processor is going to tout "Radeon R-Whatever graphics" and some laptops will use a dedicated AMD chip and they run the usual range from merely-functional display to high-performance gaming graphics. So you need to do your research and find out what the actual performance of the specific processor is.

With KSP as an interest I do think you'd be better with an Intel chip though. On the kind of money I would spend for a pre-teen you won't be getting a dedicated graphics chip, but decent Intel integrated graphics will handle KSP and Minecraft just fine. (So will decent AMD integrated). The main thing to remember with laptops is it's a case of price, performance, compactness - pick any two. So steer well clear of "2-in-1s" (which are tablets with keyboard docks), cheap ultra-slims and similar.

As far as Unity development goes, I think he'll appreciate a decent resolution screen. You can just plug into a monitor when at home, but if that's not going to be practical then I'd really try and get a laptop with a 1080p display. Working on less will feel cramped and annoying.

[Guest Space Cowboy]

1 hour ago, cantab said:

 

As far as Unity development goes, I think he'll appreciate a decent resolution screen. You can just plug into a monitor when at home, but if that's not going to be practical then I'd really try and get a laptop with a 1080p display. Working on less will feel cramped and annoying.

He does actually have a widescreen monitor from his previous system. 22" I think.

OK what does this add to the discussion -
 

"The AMD Radeon R5 is an integrated DirectX 12 graphics card found in some AMD Beema and Carrizo-L APUs (for example, the A8-6410 or A8-7410). It offers 128 shader cores across two Compute Units and based on the GCN architecture. Clock speeds can be up to 850 MHz. The graphics card does not have dedicated VRAM and will access main system memory (single-channel DDR3L-1866).

Using its UVD (Unified Video Decoder), the GPU can support the CPU when decoding videos up to 4K. In addition, the chip integrates a specialized video encoder called VCE. Video streams can output via VGA, DVI, HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2 to up to two external monitors.

The performance of the Radeon R5 is slightly above a Radeon HD 7470M or the Intel HD Graphics 4200. Typically, only older or less demanding games like FIFA will run fluently."

[cantab]

I'll add the starting caveat that comparing specs is really no substitute for actual benchmarks.

128 shader cores is in the range of things not a lot. On desktops an R7 240 costing about £50 has more than double that. The assessment that you will be limited to older or less demanding games is a fair one. KSP and Minecraft easily qualify as such. If you crank the settings, including the display resolution, down you can play fancier stuff too - I've seen Skyrim running on that 6410 chip for example. But it's a bit marginal.

Edited December 2, 2015 by cantab

[Dispatcher]

I'm guessing that the laptop is wanted due to portability (traditional meaning:  carrying it around).

I've never had a laptop, so I am not the person to advise you.  Good luck!

[pxi]

On 1/12/2015, 7:12:44, Mat2ch said:

Uhm, I've got an AMD card and I'm running linux. You just should use the free drivers... but AMD could really speed up their opensource linux driver dev a little. I hoped for OpenGL 4.5 support before christmas.

I can't even get steam to start without using the propitiatory AMD drivers.

On topic, all things being equal, I tend to prefer Nvidia cards personally.

[Mat2ch]

14 hours ago, pxi said:

I can't even get steam to start without using the propitiatory AMD drivers.

On topic, all things being equal, I tend to prefer Nvidia cards personally.

The problem might be that the open source drivers need a lot of stuff, while the proprietary pack everything in one package. For the open source part to work you need kernel support, xorg driver and the radeon part from mesa. And everything should be as new as possible, since the drivers are growing every week.

[Pixel of Life]

No. But that's based on my personal opinion, I've had nothing but bad experiences with AMD graphics cards. The first one had terrible driver problems and the second one was DOA so I had to send the whole computer back as it was a prebuilt, and after 6 weeks they sent the computer back with a card of the same model that was from a manufacturer I had never even heard of.

 

Nvidia all the way. I've never had any problems with them.