An incremental updated with interesting performance when overclocked.
We already knew that the 785G's performance wasn't going to be extraordinary and the lack of DX10.1 titles that would benefit from a speedup of the new features present in the chipset would make it even harder on AMD, which has been lacking in improving performance.
Anandtech has reviewed the new chipset and performance is on par with the old 780G:
The only interesting result is the one where the IGP is overclocked to 800MHz, or 100MHz more than the 790GX. This provides a good performance increase over the baseline, delivering greater gains in less bandwidth bound games. For gaming, sideport is mostly useless nowadays because the dual channel DDR2/DDR3 setup can provide a decent amount of bandwidth - courtesy of a 128-bit bus width - versus the measly onboard DDR3 chip that can only provide 32bits of bus width. Albeit higher clocked, it loses ground to the quick updates on CPU memory speeds.
The AMD 785G provides a reasonable gaming platform on a budget, mostly for older titles, and you'll definitely want a motherboard that allows IGP clock manipulation - more information on that should pop up soon. Stay away from it's integrated core if you're a Linux user as ATI drivers still need much work - trust me, bad Radeon HD 4830 experience. HTPC owners will want to pay attention to the lack of 8 channel LPCM over HDMI due to a chipset bug. For that you will have to turn to Nvidia's solutions.
2 comments:
I had no problems running my 780g board under linux (Debian with ATI binary drivers) and even after updating to 4670 everything is working fine. The cards handle HD-playback without problems and gaming is no problem too. Well a few years ago using the 9800pro driver installation was a little bit odd and gave me some headache but after spending some time on it it worked too ... but thats just my experience with ati and linux
Completely not my experience. I mean, I've setup a 780G motherboard in linux and it worked alright, but it was not my machine so I didn't tested much.
As for the HD 4830, the latest ATI drives still don't support kernels after 2.6.28, the 3D performance is bad, WINE gave me artifacts on any game, multiple user sessions simply didn't work - the screen just blinked and the terminal didn't open - and 2D is very slow when compared to Intel and Nvidia drivers. Oh, and no Xv support by the way, but OpenGL for video does work fine.
It was usable for internet browsing and watching video but more extensive usage of Linux isn't really pleasant IMHO.
I even had to replace my 690G media center with an GF8100 because with whatever driver I tried, I would still get screen blinks in the middle of video playback and green intermittent lines randomly for a second or so. Binary, radeonHD, radeon, they all had some kind of problem.
It's even worse now, because AMD decided that chips before the R600 architecture aren't supported anymore by the binary driver, so while the opensource drivers don't catch up, you're left with older kernels or bad 3D performance. It's great what they've done by releasing documentation of the chips but the driver support is way below that of other major industry players.
Best regards
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