For several decades, I was a loyal AMD customer. But the last time I upgraded my home desktop (2013), AMD just didn't seem to have anything that could complete with the Core-i3/5 CPUs with integrated graphics. The Intel HD-2500 GPU was plenty fast enough for everything I did back then, so I went with an i3-3220T (2 cores, 4 threads), and have been very happy with it (except for the security vulnerabilties). It even handled it fine when I started working from home and added a second monitor.
But, after the last update to the Heli-X flight simulator, I did notice that I'm bouncing off the rev-limiter on the GPU. In order to get a reasonable frame rate and sort-of-smooth background panning I had to dial-down or turn off all the configurable graphics features (anti-aliasing, smoke, reflections, etc.). Even with all of the fancy stuff turned off, it still sometimes struggles and the frame rate drops to below 20. I thought about buying a video card. A $40-50 Radeon or NVidia card would be more than enough GPU. In the past I've been burned by ATI cards being abandoned within a year or two of purcase. Is AMD any better about support? Of course, dealing with closed-source NVidia drivers is also annoying. Also, the motherboard/CPU are almost 8 years old. Maybe it's time for a new AMD Ryzen with an integrated GPU. Even the low-end sub-$100 Ryzen 3 with Vega 8 GPU would be a big jump in performance from the current Intel HD 2500. For another $40, a Ryzen 5 with Vega 11 GPU would completely outclass what I have now. How are the AMD "Wraith Stealth" fans? I've been using the fan that came with the old Core-i3, and it gets a little annoying when it's time to compile chromium (or when flying planes/helicopters). Any issues with Gentoo and Xorg on AMD integrated Vega 8/11 GPUs? AFAICT, the drivers are all open source, and it ought to "just work" with recent kernels. Unfortunately, the capaciters on the existing motherboard are all solid and probably aren't going to pop any time soon.
