# Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 On Linux



## Jaskanwar Singh (Oct 18, 2011)

[Phoronix] Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 On Linux Review
so why do people complain of amd linux drivers?


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## Skud (Oct 18, 2011)

Nice find Jas. I think AMD is improving their drivers all the time. This is good news for Linux users.


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## ico (Oct 18, 2011)

well, there is a reason for that.

Before AMD took over ATi. ATi was notorious for Linux drivers. Never ever worked. nVidia has traditionally worked always fine. Catalyst (aka fglrx) in Linux only started improving around late 2009.

Catalyst has improved enormously now as far as Linux drivers are concerned. But it still lags behind in supporting latest X.org releases. You couldn't use the latest Catalyst when Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15 were released. Catalyst only started working fine two months after their release. (This time it works fine with Ubuntu 11.10 on release)

AMD graphic cards do work fine out-of-the-box because of the officially supported open-source driver. AMD tends to make the technical documentation of their graphic cards open for this. This driver offers excellent 2D but very bad 3D support. So, games don't work fine - desktop effects work fine. There is an open source driver named nouveau for nVidia which nVidia DOES NOT support. This is a reverse engineered driver - not as good as the AMD open-source one.

Now, I use Arch Linux. nVidia proprietary driver is in the [Extra] repository which means it is fine. Catalyst rots in AUR (Arch User Repository) which means it might work fine/might not - use at your own risk. They should work on elevating Catalyst from AUR to [Extra].

Then none of the companies have offered support to dynamic switching (AMD Bacon and nVidia Optimus) on Linux. nVidia has had one card killing driver. I'll conclude by saying, both suck.

Here's a joke. Vamsi has HD 4890. Sound over HDMI worked out-of-the-box with Ubuntu (open-source driver) without the need of Catalyst. It never worked in Catalyst (Linux and Windows). lol.


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## Skud (Oct 18, 2011)

ico said:


> *
> 
> Here's a joke. Vamsi has HD 4890. Sound over HDMI worked out-of-the-box with Ubuntu (open-source driver) without the need of Catalyst. It never worked in Catalyst (Linux and Windows). lol.*




This is strange really.


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## ico (Oct 18, 2011)

This was a year ago.  May be now it works fine everywhere.


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## Cilus (Oct 18, 2011)

Great find Jas. It is actually proofing our point about constant driver updates and imrovements by AMD and zip up some the face of the people saying that AMD has bad driver support in Linux. +1 rep for u.


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Oct 18, 2011)

thanks for info ico. 

thanks for rep cilus and skud 

moreover that article is on  February 23, 2011. latest may be better.


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## vaibhav23 (Oct 20, 2011)

[Phoronix] AMD Radeon HD 6450 Review


> About the only reason you'd want to stick with the Radeon HD 6450 over NVIDIA's low-end graphics cards is if wanting to support AMD and their official open-source strategy where as the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver is developed entirely by the community without any form of support from NVIDIA Corp. At this time, the open-source Radeon Linux driver is superior in terms of the feature-completeness (e.g. power management) of its DRM and Gallium3D components compared to Nouveau.


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Oct 20, 2011)

^thanks for link buddy. rep+.


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## vaibhav23 (Oct 20, 2011)

Thanks.Read everywhere  that AMD drivers are bad in linux when compared to nvidia.
But in a quite new review(September 2011) a reputed linux review site is saying that AMD drivers are better than there counterparts drivers


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## d6bmg (Oct 21, 2011)

sunny10 said:


> [Phoronix] AMD Radeon HD 6450 Review



But still it will need days to reach where nvidia have reached already.


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## vaibhav23 (Oct 21, 2011)

For years nvidia had been better than AMD on linux.But as time changes everything starts changing


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## ico (Oct 22, 2011)

I'd classify both nVidia and AMD drivers on Linux as sh!t. Each has their own problems.

I have a XFX HD 6950 2GB (yea, it's reference ) now. For the first time I'll be using AMD/ATi GPU on a desktop of mine. Let's see how it goes in Arch Linux.



sunny10 said:


> [Phoronix] AMD Radeon HD 6450 Review
> 
> 
> > About the only reason you'd want to stick with the Radeon HD 6450 over NVIDIA's low-end graphics cards is if wanting to support AMD and their official open-source strategy where as the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver is developed entirely by the community without any form of support from NVIDIA Corp. At this time, the open-source Radeon Linux driver is superior in terms of the feature-completeness (e.g. power management) of its DRM and Gallium3D components compared to Nouveau.


That's only true for the open-source driver for nVidia cards - nouveau. The proprietary 'official' driver from nVidia is different.


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Oct 22, 2011)

ico said:


> I'd classify both nVidia and AMD drivers on Linux as sh!t. Each has their own problems.
> 
> *I have a XFX HD 6950 2GB (yea, it's reference ) now.* For the first time I'll be using AMD/ATi GPU on a desktop of mine. Let's see how it goes in Arch Linux.
> 
> ...



congrats ico. pics?


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## Skud (Oct 22, 2011)

Congrats ico. Planning to unlock?


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## vickybat (Oct 22, 2011)

*@ ico*

Congrats man. When did opt for a platform reboot?


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## ico (Nov 4, 2011)

No issues whatsoever on Ubuntu 11.10. Everything is smooth and works fine.

As far as Arch is concerned, the latest Catalyst 11.10 doesn't support the latest X.org 1.11. I said the same thing in my post #3 - delay in supporting the latest X.org releases at time. 

yup, I can downgrade to X.org 1.10 and then use Catalyst. Hardly a 5 minute job for me. But if I really had to do this, I wouldn't be using a bleeding-edge distro like Arch at the very first place.

Using the OSS driver on Arch hence which works completely fine. The only issue is my GPU's fan spins on max speed.


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Nov 4, 2011)

thanks for info ico


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## ico (Nov 6, 2011)

All right. I have also configured profile based or dynamic fan speed/voltage/frequency throttling in the open source driver for Arch. It is working completely fine now.


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## Skud (Nov 6, 2011)

Care to handhold?


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## ico (Nov 6, 2011)

*i.imgur.com/Bckey.jpg

*i.imgur.com/Cpe58.jpg


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Nov 7, 2011)

@ico 
how is arch? never used it. compared to Ubuntu 11.10?


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## ico (Nov 7, 2011)

Ubuntu is an out-of-the-box distro. You don't have to install anything in it except the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver.

With Arch...you start with nothing but command line and have to download packages and configure them step by step. Installation takes time depending upon your download speed - as you are downloading packages and configuring them on the fly. End result is - you only have things which you need. Nothing more and nothing less. Not a distribution for beginners in any case but it is the fastest Operating System around because of its "no bloat" philosophy.

The user experience depends on which Desktop Enviroment you choose to install. I am using GNOME 3 + Shell in the above screenshots. Some people prefer KDE 4.7. Ubuntu uses GNOME 3 + Unity.


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Nov 7, 2011)

ok thanks ico.


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## vickybat (Nov 7, 2011)

ico said:


> Ubuntu is an out-of-the-box distro. You don't have to install anything in it except the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver.
> 
> With Arch...you start with nothing but command line and have to download packages and configure them step by step. Installation takes time depending upon your download speed - as you are downloading packages and configuring them on the fly. End result is - you only have things which you need. Nothing more and nothing less. Not a distribution for beginners in any case but it is the fastest Operating System around because of its "no bloat" philosophy.
> 
> The user experience depends on which Desktop Enviroment you choose to install. I am using GNOME 3 + Shell in the above screenshots. Some people prefer KDE 4.7. Ubuntu uses GNOME 3 + Unity.



Can we compare arch with the red hat distribution? I guess it too has similar features like you said, "start with a command line interface and then install packages as per requirements". I  am a real noob in linux, thus asking out of curiosity.

The packages are .RPM installers right? Correct me if i'm wrong buddy.


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## ico (Nov 7, 2011)

vickybat said:


> Can we compare arch with the red hat distribution?


Nope. 



vickybat said:


> I guess it too has similar features like you said, "start with a command line interface and then install packages as per requirements".


You don't "really" start with command-line in RHEL. If you wish to, that is your choice.

RHEL is for enterprise stability. Arch is for bleeding edge - everything latest. Packages get updated everyday - rolling release.



vickybat said:


> The packages are .RPM installers right? Correct me if i'm wrong buddy.


no RPM packages for Arch.


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## vickybat (Nov 8, 2011)

^^ oh thanks for the info mate.


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## ico (Nov 17, 2011)

GNOME 3 Shell running on AMD's OpenSource driver.

**www.thinkdigit.com/forum/community-discussions/148859-small-demo-gnome-3-shell.html*


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