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Walmart will sell two laptops and a desktop PC designed in collaboration with Esports Arena:
Companies like Alienware might dominate the pre-built gaming desktop and laptop PCs, but Walmart is throwing down the gauntlet today. The company has launched its own line of powerful gaming rigs, as spotted by PC Gamer.
These machines come in three different flavors: two laptops, and a single gaming desktop. The specifications are pretty outstanding, but they come at a cost, which we'll get into later. All of the machines fall under Walmart's new "Overpowered" (OP) product line, and they're the result of the retail giant's recent collaboration with Esports Arena.
Who's next? Tesco?
Also at CNET.
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Walmart Launches its Own "Overpowered" Line of Gaming PCs
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You can never do just one thing.
-- Hardin
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Tuesday October 30 2018, @08:31PM (5 children)
(Score: 5, Informative) by requerdanos on Tuesday October 30 2018, @08:56PM (3 children)
Short answer, not the newer Nvidia cards and certainly not the 1060.
Longer answer:
According to the nouveau (the driver in linux-libre for Nvidia) wiki, the GTX 1060 (NV130) does have rudimentary 3d acceleration, but no video accelleration at all [freedesktop.org]. Phoronix has benchmarked the 3D performance of the 1060 ti, and it's the slowest Nvidia card tested [phoronix.com] despite being the newest. Nvidia has added DRM (digital restrictions management) to the firmware mechanisms of their newer cards, causing them to deliberately perform poorly unless you have the proprietary driver and firmware.
An older Nvidia card plays well with linux-libre. Say, kepler or older. I recently asked in the #nouveau channel on Freenode what card was the absolutely fastest under nouveau, and the developers said it was the GTX 780ti. They seem disgusted enough with Nvidia to advise people who come to ask questions to buy an AMD for their next GPU--AMD's free drivers require proprietary firmware, but at least they work, seems to be the general sentiment. (That's no help to someone wanting to run linux-libre, which does not support 3D acceleration on any AMD card.)
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Tuesday October 30 2018, @09:11PM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Tuesday October 30 2018, @09:17PM
You can see on the Phoronix graphs that the 780ti really dominates the benchmarks for the nouveau driver. They seem to be going for about $180 used on ebay.
Note: If you see someone on ebay selling an Nvidia card "brand new" "unbranded" from China, the chances that it's a fake (an older, slower card flashed with newer firmware to appear to be the newer card) is about 99.9%. If the card is in the US$50 - $75 range, the chances rise to about 100%. It's good to look for a recognized brand name such as MSI, EGVA, Gigabyte, etc and match the advertised specs to the published ones.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday October 31 2018, @01:59AM
You don't need the high end graphics adapters for gaming. Save those for cryptocurrency mining.
Embedded graphics such as the Intel Iris stuff can run even arcade style games at reasonable resolutions (2K) and framerates. And, they're a lot more open. I prefer AMD to Intel for a variety of reasons, some non-technical, but they really dropped the ball in this area. Been a long wait for Ryzen APUs, which are only now becoming available.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday October 30 2018, @10:15PM
Also be wary of ex-bitcoiners who realized they were losing money but also overclocked their GPUs for months at a time just above peak safe operating temperature.
GPU lemons abound in some places.