@Neil Burgin - I'm glad to hear that you are satisfied with the performance of the current open-source radeon driver. There have indeed been many recent performance improvements to the open-source radeon 3D graphics driver. This includes radeon KMS page-flipping which was introduced in the 2.6.38 kernel which was used in Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal"; and the switch from the classic Mesa 3D driver to the Gallium3D Mesa driver which happened in Mesa 7.9 (used in Ubuntu 10.10) for Radeon X1000 series GPUs and earlier, and in Mesa 7.10.1 (used in Ubuntu 11.04) for Radeon HD 2000 series GPUs and later. There were further Radeon performance improvements in Mesa 8.0 (8.0.4 is currently available in Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin") and in Mesa 9.0. Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" is using Mesa 9.0. Also, kernel 3.4 introduced 2D color tiling support for Radeon HD 5000 and HD 6000 series GPUs, which boosts performance when used in conjunction with Mesa 9.0. Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" is using a kernel which is based on the upstream 3.5 kernel.
If you ever need more performance from this driver and you have a Radeon HD 2000 or later, support for PCI Express 2.0 (PCI-E 2.0) was finally added to the open-source radeon driver in the 3.6 kernel. This has been shown to increase performance for some OpenGL workloads. A PPA of this kernel is available at http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ and instructions on how to install and uninstall it are at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to fglrx-installer in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1058040 Title: fglrx-installer not working with HD2000-4000 "legacy" cards in Quantal Status in Release Notes for Ubuntu: New Status in “fglrx-installer” package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: Following the AMD decision to change to a new driver support model for Radeon™ HD 4000, HD 3000 and HD 2000 series cards as per http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/legacy/Pages/legacy- radeon_linux.aspx , fglrx-installer installs non-working drivers. I suggest the addition of an fglrx-legacy package to install the AMD legacy drivers for users with older cards or patch the current code base for use with these cards. Output for fglrx 9.00 [1]: # lspci|grep VGA 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RS780L [Radeon HD 3000] # modprobe fglrx FATAL: Error inserting fglrx (/lib/modules/3.5.0-15-generic/updates/dkms/fglrx.ko): No such device # dmesg|tail -n3 [ 6785.693869] [fglrx] Maximum main memory to use for locked dma buffers: 7132 MBytes. [ 6785.694089] [fglrx:firegl_init_device_list] *ERROR* No supported display adapters were found [ 6785.694091] [fglrx:firegl_init_module] *ERROR* firegl_init_devices failed # dpkg --list|grep fglrx ii fglrx 2:9.000-0ubuntu1 amd64 Video driver for the AMD graphics accelerators ii fglrx-amdcccle 2:9.000-0ubuntu1 amd64 Catalyst Control Center for the AMD graphics accelerators [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fglrx-installer- updates/+bug/1032672/comments/34 !!!!!!!! WARNING !!!!!!! The following workaround has produced mixed results and left some users with temporarily broken systems. It is not recommended for production systems or novice users that are not comfortable with basic console/non-GUI recovery. USE AT OWN RISK. WORKAROUND: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:makson96/fglrx && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade && sudo apt-get -y install fglrx-legacy This workaround will downgrade X to 1.12 and install the AMD legacy fglrx 8.97 (Catalyst 12.6). To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-release-notes/+bug/1058040/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
