Testing:
value cards
Results were mixed with Intel’s HD 3000.
Running Mesa 8.0.2, the Unigine benchmark barely ran, which means many modern
games will be impossible to play. We had better luck with Alien Arena, which
gave a comfortable 60fps, but we started to form an option that if you want to
play games, you’re going to need a proprietary driver. The first Radeon GPU we
tested was the HD 6550D integrated GPU on the A8-3850 APU, with version 0.4 of
the Gallium open source driver. Desktop performance was good, and accelerated
Unity on Ubuntu worked without any problems (as it did on the Intel). Almost as
impressively, the Heaven benchmark did run better than Sandy Bridge, which is
more than can said for the same demo on our ancient Nvidia 7600GTS, but the
rendering was still broken. We watched silhouettes move across the screen at
seven frames per second, rather than colourful textures. That’s why we then
used the Catalyst proprietary drivers, which we installed manually.
You
don’t need a cutting-edge card for Linux gaming
Our next test was with Alien Arena, which
ran at a surprisingly low 25fps – more than adequate for a bit of office
mayhem, but nowhere near as good as Sandy Bridge. With the Heaven benchmark,
however, the proprietary drivers rendered the graphics correctly, and also
delivered a benchmark score of 10fps. This might seem low, but when you
consider it’s an integrated chipset and the benchmark itself isn’t optimized
for playability, it’s a good result. We tried the same test with both Unity 3D
and Unity 2D to see if there was any difference when the desktop was using
OpenGL, and we found none – proof that the recently-released Unity 5.12 did fix
the problems with OpenGL performance. We got a small step up in performance
when we tested the Radeon HD 6670 1024MB. Alien Arena was now running at 25.3fps,
with a low of 11fps and a high of 46fps. This is a great result for a budget
card, and if you opt for the passively cooled version, it would make an ideal
option for a Linux games PC and movie player.
Testing:
Power cards
This leaves us with the two most powerful
cards at our disposal – the Radeon HD6850 1024MB and the Nvidia GTX570. We
started with the Radeon, and it was quickly scoring dramatically better results
with the Heaven benchmark, returning a value of 46.2fps, minimum 15 and maximum
78.8. Emboldened by this result, we thought we’d try a couple of other tests,
firstly with the native (and ancient) version of Darwinia. This ran at an
exceptional 160-250fps, which means this card won’t have any difficulty with
older games. However, we did experience problems when we then tried Steam. To
get Bioshock to work, for example, we had to quit Unity 3D first. But even when
it did work, the graphics weren’t rendered correctly. It was better news for
Source games, though, as both Half Life 2 and the Lost Coast stress tests
yielded good results – the latter running at 47.91fps despite its still
spectacular rendering quality. Now we get to the most expensive card in our
set, Nvidia’s GTX570 with 1,280 MB of RAM. We first tried it with the open
source nouveau drivers, but we had no success running our benchmarks, Darwinia
or Steam games, and we guess that if you’re intending to spend a considerable
sum on graphics, you’ll want the best possible drivers.
Steam
on Linux means the OS is now becoming a viable alternative to Windows
There are other advantages to using
Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, too. The custom setting utility, for example,
which can be installed alongside the drivers, is a surprisingly powerful tool.
You can enable TwinView, which we’ve always found more stable than Xinerama for
multiple screens, and switch between various resolutions for each screen
without requiring a restart. The Catalyst drivers can do this too, but with
Nvidia’s you can also overclock your hardware and monitor the temperatures of
your GPU. It’s also quite handy for troubleshooting, and we’ve used the
Settings tool to download EDID data from our screens and force other screens to
use the same EDID data. With proprietary drivers, the GTX570 was a clear
winner. It gave a strong result from the Heaven benchmark, at 66,6fps, and
Bioshock ran perfectly from Stream running on Wine, so Nvidia hardware is going
the way to go for native version of Steam. As to whether it’s worth the extra
money, this depends on how important gaming is to you.
SSDs
Upgrade your storage to a drive that’s
driven only by electrons
While processors, graphics cards, RAM and network
connections have all got faster over the years, hard drive technology seems to
have moved on very little. Hard disk drives still use mechanical parts, and are
therefore among the heaviest, slowest, least reliable and most power-hungry
components in a typical computer. SSDs (solid state drives) are changing that
though, and are one of the most exciting developments in PC hardware in the
past five years.
SSDs
(solid state drives) are changing that though, and are one of the most exciting
developments in PC hardware in the past five years.
In this section, we’re going to look at
these miraculous devices. As well as comparing the two drives we have here, we’re
going to answer the most common question people have about SSDs: ““ Are they
worth it?”, “How long will they last?” and How can I get the best out of
mine?””
Are
SSDs worth it?
Traditional hard drives contain a spinning
disk, which is coated with a magnetic material. This magnetic material gets
manipulated by a read/write head as it files over the disk and it what stores
the data. In contrast, SSDs have no moving parts. Instead, they’re made of
millions of tiny transistors (of the floating gate variety), each one capable
of storing one bit of information. Because they have no moving parts, they’re
quieter, lighter, more energy efficient, more durable and faster.
This is obviously great if you’re intending
to use the drive in a laptop, where space, energy use and noise are all major
considerations. The increased speed of the drive will also have a huge impact
on PC and application startup times (and any other operation that reads from
the disk a lot), and can make your computer feel dramatically quicker.
All of these benefits sound great, but SSDs
are not without their downsides, and you should take these into consideration
before deciding to invest. Most notably, you can’t buy SSDs that are as large
as traditional-style mechanical hard drives, and they’re much more expensive.
For example, the Crucial M4 128GB that we have on test costs around $120; the
same cash will net you a 2TB hard drive. If you need a lot of space or are on a
very tiht budget, an SSd might not be for you.
The answer to the question of whether SSDs
are worth it, then, is: “It depends on how you use your computer”.
