For those of you who have followed the latest news on Phoronix, surely you have already heard that the version 12.4 of the drivers Catalyst from AMD, is the last version what's available to cardholders Radeon 2000/3000/4000 and how could it be less, this version does not support X.org 1.12.
Ubuntu y Mint By default they come with free drivers, surely more than one who has a laptop has noticed a temperature higher than the proprietary driver and in some cases like mine, between 15 and 20 degrees higher. Looking in Phoronix I found this to be really true, and I wasn't the only one suffering from this problem, so I started researching and decided to find a solution.
First we install through this PPA made by a Phoronix user, the latest git xorg-server-radeon and ati, the latest table etc.
We follow these steps:
We add the ppa:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
PPA website: https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/graphics-drivers
The step above is done in the case that we already have the drivers that come by default in Ubuntu / Mint, otherwise we will have to remove the driver fglrx through Synaptic.
After this we will install the vdpau package
sudo apt-get install vdpau-va-driver
To make it work we install the package libg3dvl-table
sudo apt-get install libg3dvl-mesa
Then we can install mplayer
sudo apt-get install mplayer
We test acceleration for mpeg2, although in the future it seems that it will be possible to accelerate more types of codecs.
Mplayer -vo vdpau archivodevideo
Now to fight with the problem of overheating. Few have looked at the reason for it and have simply complained about the problem, but there is a solution that can alleviate it, it is called profile, and we can choose between auto, low, mid and high, with this we can control the energy of our gpu. In my case I have left it low.
Sudo echo "low" > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile
As the change would only be temporary, we do the following so that the system always starts in low:
sudo nano /etc/rc.local
and inside we write:
echo "low" > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile
Done this, we save.
We rebooted and we should have our system up-to-date and working perfectly.
It is not the same as using the official ATI driver, but at least this free driver is improving and surely in the very near future we will be able to enjoy full video acceleration, the only thing that really goes wrong is flash, I don't know very well about it. because, but hey, I'll keep waiting for improvements.
Yes well, it's Done.
Anyway, the solution is quite good but in Phoronix they are also saying that the AMD Drivers are gradually improving, which I do not think is acceptable because the rest of the competition already have OpenCL support, OpenGL quite a bit, but quite advanced and support X. org without problems. The other is when wayland arrives, which will only be supported by Noveau drivers and other free ones, which would be good if Nvidia, AMD and Intel were given the task of supporting Wayland, which Nvidia categorically rejected but in the long run it will give up.
I leave grammar to you, which is your specialty. The free amd drivers support many things already and others are being developed, taking into account that the closed driver support for opencl is horrible, you could not expect much more in the free one, we will see, for more information here:
http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature#VSYNC
407 days without fixing the kick to the dictionary ... Correct "Echo" and give it an h ... Done.
Or you can use the beta, 12.6.
The beta 12.6 come without support for the cards prior to the 5000 series, at least my radeon 4650, they do not work.
What a shame ... 🙁 There is less and less left for them to put aside the one I have, from the 5000 series.
There are some 5000 that actually have a 4000 core, I hope you haven't dropped one of those ... xD, I guess your 5000 still has at least two years left.
As far as I understand they say that this release is only once, according to what I read, if a new kernel or xorg comes out, these drivers will not last at all, it seems a shame but good to change card.
Sudo echo "low"> / sys / class / drm / card0 / device / power_profile
Is it suitable for all cards and with any driver?
Yes, for all but the 7000 series, remember that when you restart the configuration, unless you save it in rc.local
Thank you very much for this article, it has helped me to have the latest free driver for my ATi HD4330. What I had a problem: The videos on YouTube were seen with the wrong colors. In the end, the solution was as simple as removing the packages related to VDPAU since it seems that the Youtube flash made it work. The funny thing is that other websites with flash video such as Vimeo if the colors looked good so I have assumed that it does not work.
Well here the packages that I have deleted: vdpau-va-driver and libg3dvl-mesa.
Now everything is perfect.
Flash is bad because the ubuntu 12.04 version has problems with the libvdpau1 package on Nvidia cards, and I wouldn't be surprised if something similar to the one you comment on in this post happens: vdpau-va-driver.
In this link all the info: http://askubuntu.com/questions/117127/flash-video-appears-blue