I bought a Zotac AD12 mainly for running XBMC on it (I also want to have it running Couch Potato, Sickbeard, Deluge and Sabnzbd in the background but I can easily forget about that if it gets in the way of XBMC running smoothly). I had always heard that AMD video card drivers were lousy on Linux but I had no idea how awful they could be until now. The AD12 has an AMD Radeon HD 7340 and I have the latest proprietary drivers for it installed but still I haven't been able to get it to play smoothly on some of the bigger mkv files and even some small Avi file whenever there's a lot of movement. I get jitter and tearing and it's simply driving me crazy. My cousin has this exact same PC running on Windows 7 and it plays the very same files I have without a hitch.
I've done everything under the sun to the XBMC settings, I set the video memory on the bios to 1GB instead of the default 256MB, I tried booting straight into XBMC, running it with nothing else running in the background... you name it. It's also worth noting that I've been using XBMC since back when it was only on Xbox (so I know my way around) and that I've tried all this with Lubuntu 13.04, XBMCBuntu and Mint 15 XFCE. I even considered switching to Windows but I have 2 USB HDDS and each one is 3TB and formatted in EXT3 so converting that to NTFS for Windows would be a real pain.
Anyway, I've been thinking lately of replacing the AD12 with another Zotac, the ID83 to be precise. This one has an i3 CPU which is by itself an improvement (mostly for running all the extra stuff in the background) and an Intel HD Graphics 4000. Money wouldn't be an issue since I already have somebody that's willing to buy the AD12 from me so I wouldn't lose any money on it.
My question is, how much better are the Linux drivers for the Intel card compared to the AMD. I've never dealt with either one under Linux except for everyday desktop tasks so I can't really tell. My experience with XBMC under linux has always been on NVIDIA cards and all the reviews I've found online are under Windows.
Thanks in advance for your comments.
I've done everything under the sun to the XBMC settings, I set the video memory on the bios to 1GB instead of the default 256MB, I tried booting straight into XBMC, running it with nothing else running in the background... you name it. It's also worth noting that I've been using XBMC since back when it was only on Xbox (so I know my way around) and that I've tried all this with Lubuntu 13.04, XBMCBuntu and Mint 15 XFCE. I even considered switching to Windows but I have 2 USB HDDS and each one is 3TB and formatted in EXT3 so converting that to NTFS for Windows would be a real pain.
Anyway, I've been thinking lately of replacing the AD12 with another Zotac, the ID83 to be precise. This one has an i3 CPU which is by itself an improvement (mostly for running all the extra stuff in the background) and an Intel HD Graphics 4000. Money wouldn't be an issue since I already have somebody that's willing to buy the AD12 from me so I wouldn't lose any money on it.
My question is, how much better are the Linux drivers for the Intel card compared to the AMD. I've never dealt with either one under Linux except for everyday desktop tasks so I can't really tell. My experience with XBMC under linux has always been on NVIDIA cards and all the reviews I've found online are under Windows.
Thanks in advance for your comments.
