Need help setting up ATI R7 260X

[gfurst]

Hellow fellow linux nerds, this is my first post and I'm in dire need of a guiding hand.
Let me first say thanks to phoronix, I found out about this researching for my new PC rig, its hardware test comparison helped me choosing this ATI r7 260x card, which correct me if I'm wrong, but seems pretty good.

But I do still need some help as the Catalyst driver is pretty bad documented and hard to deal with.
I'm on Debian Jessie, tried out smxi scripts and ended up with 3.15 liquorix kernel, 14.4 Catalyst from AMD.
Actually the mesa driver seemed pretty good and stable, I'm just trying out the catalyst driver, since its reported to get the best performance from games and such.

The first issue I'm having is of course underscan, this apparently reported by several others, its giving me a really hard time to deal with, the normal solution:

sudo aticonfig --set-pcs-val=MCIL,DigitalHDTVDefaultUnderscan,0

isn't persistent, every time I set this, reboot a look back at the pcs file, the entry is missing, actually only now I've successfully used this, quitting X environment, setting it, starting X again.
But I don't really know if this will persist.
Besides that, the only way to fix this was:

sudo aticonfig --set-dispattrib=dfp5,positionX:0
sudo aticonfig --set-dispattrib=dfp5,positionY:0
sudo aticonfig --set-dispattrib=dfp5,sizeX:1920
sudo aticonfig --set-dispattrib=dfp5,sizeY:1080

Which also isn't persistent, not even when the screen goes blank. And one can see how annoying this could be.

Second issue is about the card performance. Until now I've only been able to test it once, the game looked pretty good but had some hang ups, which is a MAJOR let down.
Apart from that, I was seeing some artifacts, which I just found out are caused by vertical tearing. Adjusted this setting, lets see how it does.
I would also like some suggestion of game that can showcase the power of the card, just to test it out.

Finally, the other issues are just things to hammer down and get things working perfectly.
Audio coming from the HDMI port is really garbled , audible but bad, was the same from the mesa driver. Would like to get it working or to just disable it completely.
My display apparently has this DDC/CI feature, pretty wide range of backlight brightness, I would like to try to control it via software, with xbacklight or ddccontrol.
And finally again, I would like your opinions if I should stay with the catalyst, try on the open-source or fully go for the catalyst beta 14.6

Thanks, I know this is a lot of stuff I'm asking in, any input is appreciated.

[eydee]

The overscan stuff is a bug in recent Catalyst versions. The setting is missing from CCC for these newer video cards, probably that's why your settings are not retained. Make sure you report it, as well as anything else you find (performance, games not running etc.). I suggest you submit one bug report per issue and make sure you include as much information as you can.

http://www.amd.com/linuxreport

Note that this is only an interface to receive bug reports, so don't expect an answer. If you need to talk to them, contact AMD Customer Care. You'll find contact links on amd.com.

[Smask]

Gfurst, are you connected to a TV? It seems that your card identifies your display as a video device and therefore enables under/overscan.

To fix this you need to tell the TV to present itself as a computer monitor. How you change the mode on your display, I don't know. You have to consult your TV manual for this.

On my LG LCD TV, I had to change the label on the HDMI port from DVD to PC. And that setting were found under the sub menu "Option" in the TV menu.On other TVs you switch between Video and VGA mode.

If you have to fiddle with under/overscan or aspect ratio either in the drivers or on the TV, you're doing something wrong.

[gfurst]

Hey guys, thanks for replying.
I've actually managed to work around the underscan issue, simply by issuing the mentioned command with x closed, for some reason its now permanent:

sudo aticonfig --set-pcs-val=MCIL,DigitalHDTVDefaultUnderscan,0

I'm gonna file a bug report either way.
I'm pretty sure my monitor is not a HDTV, its just a regular LED screen with built-in speakers, connected through HDMI port. Its a AOC I2369VM model, if you want to check out.

Everything is working reasonably well, with exception from:
HDMI audio very garbled, the built-in speakers are not good, but still they would be useful at night or some occasions. Audio is scratchy and echoed a bit, I think it has something to do with pulseaudio.
There was a issue where xorg DPMS wouldn't be able to set the screen to sleep, I've erased my config files, and now the screen will suspend but doesn't come back.
I've seen reports from both of these cases but no actual solution.

More importantly, I like your take and opinion between the radeon or the catalyst driver. I've seen lots of people reporting radeon is providing better performance in some cases.

[gfurst]

Just an update.
Tried yesterday to install fglrx again, from the repos, beta version, anything really didn't quite work. After some struggle trying to install the beta driver from AMD it failed with dkms issue, trying to install through sgfxi warned me about incompatible with current Xorg version (also gave me wrong versions number for fglrx), on the AMD its reported to work with Xorg up to 1.15, so I gave a I went ahead and tried anyway, it appeared to be installed corretly and without errors, however, booting again failed to start X and kicked me to console. Tried also to install the Catalyst from the repos, as it would be just as fine if it worked, however, fglrx is apperently removed from the testing repository. Maybe due to recent updates, was the thing causing my desktop to crash on an login loop.

Removed the supposedly fglrx installed, this time via the provided script. Tried to boot expecting a Xserver with radeon loaded but was thrown back to console.
Went ahead and did a extensively search on left overs from all of these miserable operations left and right.
Found hidden blacklist radeon in the modprobe.d, something also boot parameter "nomodeset modeset.radeon=0" (probably the sgfxi), removed those, moved all xorg.conf remaining, did update-initframfs, did update-grub, removed cache.
Finally was able to boot to X with radeon working the way its supposed to.
Xorg.0.log

[     6.103] (II) RADEON(0): [DRI2] Setup complete
[     6.103] (II) RADEON(0): [DRI2]   DRI driver: radeonsi
[     6.103] (II) RADEON(0): [DRI2]   VDPAU driver: radeonsi
[     6.103] (II) RADEON(0): Front buffer size: 8160K
[     6.103] (II) RADEON(0): VRAM usage limit set to 1872486K
[     6.104] (==) RADEON(0): Backing store enabled
[     6.104] (II) RADEON(0): Direct rendering enabled
[     6.182] (II) RADEON(0): Use GLAMOR acceleration.
[     6.182] (II) RADEON(0): Acceleration enabled
[     6.182] (==) RADEON(0): DPMS enabled
[     6.182] (==) RADEON(0): Silken mouse enabled
[     6.186] (II) RADEON(0): Set up textured video (glamor)
[     6.186] (II) RADEON(0): [XvMC] Associated with GLAMOR Textured Video.
[     6.186] (II) RADEON(0): [XvMC] Extension initialized.
[     6.186] (II) RADEON(0): RandR 1.2 enabled, ignore the following RandR disabled message.
[     6.213] (--) RandR disabled
[     6.219] (II) SELinux: Disabled on system
[     6.220] (II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_MESA_copy_sub_buffer
[     6.220] (II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_ARB_create_context
[     6.220] (II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_ARB_create_context_profile
[     6.220] (II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_EXT_create_context_es2_profile
[     6.220] (II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_INTEL_swap_event
[     6.220] (II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_SGI_swap_control and GLX_MESA_swap_control
[     6.220] (II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_EXT_framebuffer_sRGB
[     6.220] (II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_ARB_fbconfig_float
[     6.220] (II) AIGLX: GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap backed by buffer objects
[     6.221] (II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized radeonsi
[     6.221] (II) GLX: Initialized DRI2 GL provider for screen 0
[     6.229] (II) RADEON(0): Setting screen physical size to 508 x 285

So things finally are working for the open-source radeon driver. But still some Steam game do not work properly, or do not work at all. Sure its something to do with steam runtime, really annoying.
Still going to try one more to install the Catalyst driver for optimal performance, this time goind to get the deb files from experimental, should be WAAAYYYYY easier (dumb me didn't think about this earlier).
But I get a feeling radeonsi will be the stuff in the near future, really it only needs steam to fix its runtime and will practically perfect.

[gfurst]

Spent the whole day again trying to ge fglrs to work in various ways, manually installing packages from debian experimenal (they have fglrx beta), manually installing from the beta package from AMD, downgrading xserver and related packages to debian stable (supposedly compatible with fglrx).
Finally was getting a complete blank screen when starting x, no error on logs, not even throw back to console. I give up on this f*cking shit.
Took a lot of work to get xorg working with radeon again as it simply still wouldn't start, finally fixed after some hours, don't exactly know how, but sgfxi did help.
The open source radeon is pretty good, and I hope AMD keeps developing it as it offers way better compatibility with xserver.
Only issue now is to get steam to properly use the card's potential.

Maybe I'll have the chance to sell this card to a friend who is also building a PC and is a Windows user, so he won't have issues, then buying for a similar performance but more expensive Nvidia card.
Lets see how this pans out.

[vein]

Spent the whole day again trying to ge fglrs to work in various ways, manually installing packages from debian experimenal (they have fglrx beta), manually installing from the beta package from AMD, downgrading xserver and related packages to debian stable (supposedly compatible with fglrx).
Finally was getting a complete blank screen when starting x, no error on logs, not even throw back to console. I give up on this f*cking shit.
Took a lot of work to get xorg working with radeon again as it simply still wouldn't start, finally fixed after some hours, don't exactly know how, but sgfxi did help.
The open source radeon is pretty good, and I hope AMD keeps developing it as it offers way better compatibility with xserver.
Only issue now is to get steam to properly use the card's potential.

Maybe I'll have the chance to sell this card to a friend who is also building a PC and is a Windows user, so he won't have issues, then buying for a similar performance but more expensive Nvidia card.
Lets see how this pans out.

Hi

Just read your posts and wanted to give you my experience with Catalyst .

I am running ubuntu and I have never got Catalst working from the Ubuntu-repos... I always get some kind of problems. Neither does it work if I run the installer from AMD:s homepage straight forward. What I usually do when I install the drivers is to download the driver packakge from AMd and then use it to build packages for Ubuntu:

 sudo ./amd-driver-installer-catalyst-14-4-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/trusty

Out of that I get 3 *.deb oackages that I can install, you should be able to list all supported distros and choosing your preferance. After installing those I need to do:

 sudo aticonfig --initial

and reboot. That usually works perfectly for me. (Only, the last time I got underscan problems and problem with a bug in Unity. For the first I used the line you used above and it was persistent for me, for the second, I switch to KDE and now I got a great desktop).

I have probably already tried this, but I though it might help you or someone else reading this.

[dungeon]

Spent the whole day again trying to ge fglrs to work in various ways, manually installing packages from debian experimenal (they have fglrx beta), manually installing from the beta package from AMD, downgrading xserver and related packages to debian stable (supposedly compatible with fglrx).
Finally was getting a complete blank screen when starting x, no error on logs, not even throw back to console. I give up on this f*cking shit.
Took a lot of work to get xorg working with radeon again as it simply still wouldn't start, finally fixed after some hours, don't exactly know how, but sgfxi did help.
The open source radeon is pretty good, and I hope AMD keeps developing it as it offers way better compatibility with xserver.
Only issue now is to get steam to properly use the card's potential.

Maybe I'll have the chance to sell this card to a friend who is also building a PC and is a Windows user, so he won't have issues, then buying for a similar performance but more expensive Nvidia card.
Lets see how this pans out.

You choose The Greatest Day for trying blobs in Debian Jessie , both are temporally removed from there due to xserver transition .

https://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvidia-graphics-drivers/news/20140716T163916Z.html

https://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fglrx-driver/news/20140715T163916Z.html

[gfurst]

You choose The Greatest Day for trying blobs in Debian Jessie , both are temporally removed from there due to xserver transition .

https://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvidia-graphics-drivers/news/20140716T163916Z.html

https://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fgl...5T163916Z.html

Yeah what a luck han?, but I've guess anyone updating on testing will be met with an unfortunate surprise.

@vein, yeah, I've actually tried to compile the packages from beta and regular release, with the Debian/testing option but it errors out everytime. Didn't delve into solving it, though there may be something there.
Anyway I don't think catalyst will work with new version of xorg, and downgrading only creates a huge mess, so I'm sticking with the radeon driver.
It seems to work pretty good either way, everything works as intended, I only need to fix/or wait for a fix from steam. Some more tools to inspect the card temperature, frequency and stuff would also be nice.

[vein]

Yeah what a luck han?, but I've guess anyone updating on testing will be met with an unfortunate surprise.

@vein, yeah, I've actually tried to compile the packages from beta and regular release, with the Debian/testing option but it errors out everytime. Didn't delve into solving it, though there may be something there.
Anyway I don't think catalyst will work with new version of xorg, and downgrading only creates a huge mess, so I'm sticking with the radeon driver.
It seems to work pretty good either way, everything works as intended, I only need to fix/or wait for a fix from steam. Some more tools to inspect the card temperature, frequency and stuff would also be nice.

You might get the error since you dont have all the dependencies you neew...(I always forget that part). I think this is what you need to isntall (on Ubuntu):

sudo apt-get install build-essential cdbs fakeroot dh-make debhelper debconf libstdc++6 dkms libqtgui4 wget execstack libelfg0 dh-modaliases

and also, if you have a 64-bit system, i think you need to install these too:

 sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch i386 lib32gcc1 libc6-i386