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Comment: Re:The drivers still suck, so why bother? (Score 1) 189

by FreonTrip (#43538843) Attached to: AMD Radeon HD 7990 Released: Dual GPUs and 6G of Memory for $1000
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.

Comment: Re:The drivers still suck, so why bother? (Score 1) 189

by FreonTrip (#43537019) Attached to: AMD Radeon HD 7990 Released: Dual GPUs and 6G of Memory for $1000
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...

Comment: Re:Is it worth it? (Score 1) 189

by FreonTrip (#43536575) Attached to: AMD Radeon HD 7990 Released: Dual GPUs and 6G of Memory for $1000
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.

Comment: Re:The drivers still suck, so why bother? (Score 2) 189

by FreonTrip (#43536549) Attached to: AMD Radeon HD 7990 Released: Dual GPUs and 6G of Memory for $1000
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...

Comment: Re:Twice as big as it needs to be? (Score 1) 332

by FreonTrip (#43521753) Attached to: 64-bit x86 Computing Reaches 10th Anniversary
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.

Comment: Re:Twice as big as it needs to be? (Score 1) 332

by FreonTrip (#43520507) Attached to: 64-bit x86 Computing Reaches 10th Anniversary
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.

Comment: Re:Twice as big as it needs to be? (Score 1) 332

by FreonTrip (#43520475) Attached to: 64-bit x86 Computing Reaches 10th Anniversary
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.

Comment: Re:HORRIBLE for Doom or Duke (Score 1) 189

by FreonTrip (#43281701) Attached to: DOS Emulation Arrives For the Raspberry Pi
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.

Comment: Re:This may not be so bad... (Score 1) 76

by FreonTrip (#42889543) Attached to: AMD Next-Gen Graphics May Slip To End of 2013
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.

Comment: Re:This may not be so bad... (Score 1) 76

by FreonTrip (#42870963) Attached to: AMD Next-Gen Graphics May Slip To End of 2013
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.

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