The problem isn't just surfacing for DTS Master HD films - my Blu-ray player connected via HDMI to the same TV grunts through everything fine, and the audio problems have happened with AAC and Dolby Digital from Netflix streaming as well. We'll see what happens after I rebuild the system.

Yeah, I've been wondering about that. The configuration's pretty vanilla: the Radeon uses an HDMI cable to connect to a late 2011-era Philips HDTV that hasn't given a pinch of trouble otherwise, and there aren't amps or optical audio to complicate the pipeline any at this point. While the glitch appears during video playback, it's surfaced in both Netflix (where I'd expect Silverlight to be a possible culprit of a DRM snafu) and VLC (where I definitely wouldn't). Fingers crossed hoping the issue disappears going into a clean install, and fingers crossed extra-hard that AMD finally releases the first official, non-beta driver in months soon...

Short of using it for OpenCL at lower rates than FirePro cards or gaming across multiple high-res monitors or a numbingly high-res projector, I've got to agree. But if its generous margins help subsidize ongoing research into cards mortal humans can use and appreciate, I can't complain either.

The only issue I've run into with the Radeon 7750 I snagged last year for my home theater PC has nothing to do with 3D rendering. For some reason, there is a very occasional glitch with the card's HDMI audio during video playback that causes a weird, harsh, and intermittent kind of sound artifacting, and after a couple of seconds the audio rolls off into silence... and then goes back to normal. If the problem persists after a fresh install onto mostly new hardware (goodbye Athlon X2 5050e, hello Ivy Bridge Celeron), I'm just giving up on the HDMI audio altogether and going back to a mini-stereo cable. Overall I'm pretty happy, but that's an irritating unpolished edge on what's otherwise been a terrific bargain and a reliable performer. It sure as hell didn't make me eager to grab a Radeon for my Linux workstation...

I didn't know that! Some time soon I'm gonna have to get some very old games up and running in Linux soon... Thank you!

Sure, and heaven forbid any of those "users buying commodity computers with 64-bit CPUs and OSes" could ever use their hardware to begin tinkering with high-resolution video editing, or programming, or playing with the full capabilities of the hardware with which Moore's Law has blessed them. The fact that I do real work that can use more than 4 GB RAM doesn't mean the average user of whom you clearly think very little is incapable of doing so.

Look, I like bashing straw man lazy programmers as much as anybody. But in scientific computing in the year 2013 - say, where you need to store 50 cubic miles of subsurface 4-dimensional seismic reflector data for 3D visualization and modeling density change over time - you run into the limits of 4 gigabytes very quickly. Never mind large-scale simulations run in TOUGH2-MP... Don't paint with such a large brush. People may piss memory on stuff that ran in less RAM back in 1996, but we're not there any more, and adventurous, relevant, and efficient uses of RAM really do exist.

Nah - your primitives are doubled in size, which realistically represents something closer to a 25-33% size increase on average. But between the abilities to manipulate MUCH larger quantities of data at once and addressing >3.5 GB RAM, it's an easy choice unless you absolutely need 16-bit support.

Maybe he's talking about an Athlon(64) X2 6000+? If that's the case it's not competitive with any i3 I've ever heard of and wouldn't even make my Lynnfield i5 750 sweat, never mind an Ivy Bridge. But it should manage 1080p video OK... Maybe a player upgrade is needed.

With respect, I think you're misremembering things. Doom I can almost believe, but busy scenes would still give it an occasional hiccup. Duke might have given playable framerates if you used its abominably ugly "low detail" mode in 320x200. But Quake was very unforgiving - you'd be lucky to manage 512x384 on a then-scalding Pentium Pro 150 with a decent video card. The included TECHINFO.TXT file warned that id Software wouldn't accept bug reports about slow performance on 486 chips. It just wasn't designed for them.

If you wanna play Doom like it's 1993, there's always Chocolate Doom...

Um, wouldn't it make more sense to run an ARM port of MAME? I'm not sure anyone's still maintaining an MS-DOS port of MAME, and even if they were a low-end 486 wouldn't handle arcade games that were contemporary around the time of its heyday.

Seconding this - on less than a 50 MHz 486 with VLB video Duke Nukem 3D chugged badly. It ran pretty effortlessly on a friend's 133 MHz 486, as I recall, and on my Pentium 90 it was bearable at 640x480 when I used the SciTech Display Doctor.

Christ, that was a long time ago...

Yeesh. That's almost as heartbreaking as finding an ancient box I'd built for college two years ago, booting it up, installing Slackware, and discovering that no one ever bothered to fix the driver for its Rendition Verite 2200 to support 2D acceleration. At this point I wouldn't hold my breath for a fix; I'd just switch to Xfce and swear oaths of vengeance. It's probably more productive than waiting for this to get fixed on either side of the driver support pool.

Only five years of support is shitty, no question. Out of curiosity, what are the GeforceFX and Geforce 6 cards doing wrong in Gnome 3? The Geforce6 cards were just bumped to legacy support last month, but the FXes have been in limbo for a lot longer... and Nvidia's failure to ever release a driver better than beta quality for NT 6 was pretty fucking irritating.