Problems with AMD drivers. (Unplayable)

[Rynaro]

I'm having trouble playing games on Steam for Linux .
The problems are the following:
- Extreme slowness in some cases ;
- Sometimes a sudden lag happens ;
- Some animations slow response of your computer peripherals (mouse and keyboard ) ;

Now talking about my computer:

Ubuntu 13.10 - 64bits
AMD Phenom X4 965@3.4Ghz
2 x 4GB Corsair Vengeance = 8GB
ATI Radeon HD 6670 Core Edition - 2GB / 128 bits

Driver xorg-edgers for ATI;

Doing benchmark tests ( 3 tests I performed ) . I obtained the following results :

fgl_glxgears = Average 5082 FPS
glxgears = Average FPS 11576
glmark2 = Total average 2381 FPS

The same games on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 running at max settings without any problems .

Note that I can play Battlefield 3 with maximum con figurations without any problem described above.

Sorry if I wrote something wrong or without agreement. English is not my native language .

[Cosmo]

There are a number of known driver problems with AMD graphics cards that are yet to be fully resolved, sadly :\

[⚡🍉OverlordTomala🍉⚡]

Have you tried using the proprietary GPU drivers instead? That might help.

[⚡🍉OverlordTomala🍉⚡]

Here you go: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/legacy?product=Legacy1&os=Linux%20x86_64

[640kB]

Originally posted by OverlordTomala:

Here you go: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/legacy?product=Legacy1&os=Linux%20x86_64

These drivers are for Radeon HD 4000 cards or older. And I would install the drivers via paketmanager.

Here is a HowTo:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI

[Rynaro]

Originally posted by OverlordTomala:

Have you tried using the proprietary GPU drivers instead? That might help.

It was my first attempt.
I downloaded the driver directly from AMD's website.

[Cosmo]

Originally posted by Rynaro:

Originally posted by OverlordTomala:

Have you tried using the proprietary GPU drivers instead? That might help.

It was my first attempt.
I downloaded the driver directly from AMD's website.

Ah, generally speaking downloading and executing files is not a good idea on linux.

Moreover, not neccasary, and if it was neccasary, then it's problem a steep-hilled battle to get it working xD

[Rynaro]

Originally posted by 640kB:

Originally posted by OverlordTomala:

Here you go: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/legacy?product=Legacy1&os=Linux%20x86_64

These drivers are for Radeon HD 4000 cards or older. And I would install the drivers via paketmanager.

Here is a HowTo:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI

There are several ways this how-to.
Which one should I follow?

[Toquita]

I'm starting to think this is clearly a driver problem. And sometimes a Valve one. And other times both.
I've had many problems with games crashing and losing frames.

* Ubuntu = Bad
*Mint = Bad
*Debian = Good, except L4D2 which loses frames from 200 to 10 fps. Driver version was 304.xx
* openSUSE = Was good in 12.2 with some 304.xx driver. Then 12.3 was horrible
* Arch = good, except L4D2. Driver version 325.15

Don't forget to disable Cool 'n Quiet on your BIOS settings.

[Rynaro]

Originally posted by Arch Linux - Junior s2 Camila:

I'm starting to think this is clearly a driver problem. And sometimes a Valve one. And other times both.
I've had many problems with games crashing and losing frames.

* Ubuntu = Bad
*Mint = Bad
*Debian = Good, except L4D2 which loses frames from 200 to 10 fps. Driver version was 304.xx
* openSUSE = Was good in 12.2 with some 304.xx driver. Then 12.3 was horrible
* Arch = good, except L4D2. Driver version 325.15

Don't forget to disable Cool 'n Quiet on your BIOS settings.

So you think if I install and configure Debian 7 (or Debian Testing) can solve most of my problems?

[Toquita]

I'm not sure, because I have an nvidia card. The best I can tell is "go and figure it out", but it might take months to test all variables, all distros with all drivers available.

[Rynaro]

I found this very strange performance of my PC, because in my view he is not with a bad configuration to point to behave this way.
I also noticed that when playing some Flash games he also catches the flash, which does not happen with my Ultrabook (i3 + HD4000).
Moreover, the performance of my graphics Ultrabook in question is far superior to my desktop.
What should not happen, because the configuration of my PC is a bit higher than Ultrabbook.

[Toquita]

The hardware quality has some power, but doesn't hold all the cards. I have an AMD Athlon II 250 @3.6Ghz and I've seen my hardware have more frames than some i7's. It's all a matter of which hardware has the best support.

[Rynaro]

I disabled Cool n Quiet and my FPS increased dramatically in performance benchmark.

But I'm far from solving this problem with my Ubuntu and ATI.

[Oerthling]

I've been playing on Linux for years - on both AMD and NVidia cards. I actually got an AMD card a few years ago just because they started to open up information and dedicated devs to work on the open source drivers and I wanted to support that.

I *always* had a much better experience with NVidia drivers. NVidia used to suck at suporting open source drivers (though it seems that changes now) – but their proprietary drivers for Linux were always close enough to their Windows version in my experience.

I had better experience with the open source drivers for AMD than with the propprietary drivers.
Recently (couple weeks ago) I reinstalled Ubuntu 13.10 on my previous laptop (from ca 2010) - it has an AMD 4670 card (R730, mobile version). AMDs proprietary drivers were always troublesome on that machine. Games either didn't work at all or had very low fps. A year ago or so AMD dropped support for that chipset and the proprieteray drivers didn't work anymore with Ubuntu 12.05 update.

So now I put the current Ubuntu on it with the open source drivers. And just for fun and giggles I installed Steam and a bunch of games.
Everything worked. Some older or simpler ones even had playable fps.
L4D now has *much* higher (and playable) FPS than the proprietary drivers on that machine ever had.

I haven't tried the AMD drivers for a year or 2 and they might have gotten much better in the meantime (for the recent cards they still support). But from what I read again and again on this forum - not that much. I would like for things to be different, because I want serious competition between graphic cards manufacturers and I like AMD for supporting the open source drivers for years.

But - in my experience (and every other thread I read on this form) - at least for now - it seems you need a Nvidia card for a good experinece with playing high-end games on Linux.

There are a lot of threads here about people complaining about issues with Steam games - and there's usually a string or replies that don't see the problem. And I see a strong corrleation between AMD vs Nvidia on the one hand and Problem vs Works on the other.

If you're stuck with an AMD card - give the open source drivers a try. I don't expect them to be fast enough for current games which demand a lot - but it might be good enough for what you want to play.

[640kB]

Originally posted by Rynaro:

Originally posted by 640kB:

These drivers are for Radeon HD 4000 cards or older. And I would install the drivers via paketmanager.

Here is a HowTo:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI

There are several ways this how-to.
Which one should I follow?

Try to install fglrx-installer-experimental-13, as described in "2. Installation via the Ubuntu repositories". As far as I know you can install it with the Hardware drivers manager. I am not using Ubuntu, so I cant test it. But I am also using an AMD graphic card (Radeon HD 6850) and many games run without problems for me.