Suggestions about how to make a Radeon HD 7790 work decently?

[peppercats]

Sell it and buy an nvidia card.

I regret my AMD purchase

[Praxis]

Upgrading to 14.10 would not be my preferred option since that would A) leave me with an unsupported OS for a few months, since 13.10 is only supported for 9 months, and B) commit me to upgrading again every 6 months until 16.04.

I completely botched this upgrade, I think my main problem was that I didn't do the recommended "sudo ppa-purge ppaibaf/graphics-drivers" to clear out the oibaf stuff. I simply forgot about that option, and instead manually downgraded every oibaf package I saw when I used synaptic to filter by origin. Unfortunately I may have disabled the oibaf repo too soon or simply didn't know that it wouldn't locate all the out-of-repository drivers that I'd installed. So when I did my "do-release-upgrade" I made a hash of things. I ended up having to manually remove all of KDE and a bunch of other stuff to get the upgrade to complete, and then xorg was borked on the other end. I logged in to XFCE, and kept trying to install the many packages I'd been forced to remove to make the upgrade go through and then I discovered that most of the oibaf stuff was still installed, but in the "Local" section of synaptic. So I had to Control+E each package in that section of synaptic to see if it was the out-of-repository version and then downgrade them one by one (if I choose too many at once it would have ripped out the rest of X & I'd have had to rebuild the system from scratch).

Though it took hours I was able to whack all the oibaf stuff and replace it with trusty versions and when I rebooted everything was pretty much ducky. I don't know if driver performance is as good as it was under the 3.14 kernel and oibaf under salamander, but it was pretty decent with the stock versions, desktop is fluid, desktop effects are working, both monitors are working in their proper resolutions and preferred orientations, my Silcon Dust TV tuner seems to be happy... Yes, I know, I would have saved time and had a better system if I'd just done a clean install, but I'm stubborn (read: crazy) that way. I feel that a Linux desktop ought to be upgradeable even if you add gobs of weird packages and multiple desktops. And at least with Debian and Ubuntu, they pretty much are upgradeable if you are bloody-minded enough to keep at it. Fedora, well, maybe its better to start over after an upgrade or two.

I may well upgrade to the 3.14 kernel, that seems easy enough (though I've had enough for today), but I'm not inclined to get back on the oibaf train again or use the Xorg-edgers repository, just because it is too much package churn. I personally prefer LTS releases and Debian stable because the latest and greatest performance is less important to me then not having to futz with my systems endlessly (I do enough of that anyway).

So to celebrate I decided to try a game, finally, and kicked up 0ad. It occupied both of my monitors (horizontal and vertical)s, full screen and my mouse & keyboard didn't seem to work on the menus or anything. I had to use a TTY to kill it. I got a minute in the the nexuiz tutorial before I got frustrated and started trying to figure out how to quit the game. I did a few controlled flights into terrain in gl-117 before I figured out how to quit the game. I don't think I'm cut out to be a gamer. I think I may have spent $80 more wisely in the past then when I bought this display adapter.

[plonoma]

Would wait another 6 to 12 months to get a good kernel + good graphics drivers + both considered stable.

[bridgman]

From the version numbers as I understand them this should be good enough to give my Radeon HD 7790 an acceptable radeon driver. I guess I'll report back if smoke starts billowing out of my case. I don't know that I would be using the radeonSI stuff anymore, so I gather I can disable my xorg.conf.

If you mean "good enough to give ... an acceptable open source graphics stack" then you'll still want a 3.14 kernel or you won't get dpm on CI parts (like yours) and so you won't get full performance. You'll probably want to pick up the latest userspace bits while you're at it :

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY1NTU

The big benefit of using 14.04 as a base is that you shouldn't have to manually change xorg.conf to use the full open source stack (13.10 just used kernel modesetting). You'll still be using the radeonsi driver in mesa for 3D acceleration.

[grndzro]

Use the stable kernel

Follow the script for command line install do not skip any steps
Simply open a terminal and copy and paste the commands after the $

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD

[Praxis]

So I'm thinking of upgrading my Saucy Salamander to Trusty Tahr now that the final LTS is out. I figure I can remove 3.14.0-031400rc2-generic & other non-repo kernels that I fooled with, disable oibaf/graphics-drivers, reboot into the borked radeon saucy graphics, dist-upgrade to Trusty Tahr with its "3.13.0-24.46 Ubuntu Linux kernel which is based on the v3.13.9 upstream stable Linux kernel." According to the Tahr release notes the new LTS seems like it should handle my card.

The Xorg display server and drivers have been updated to the 15.0.1 release and mesa has been updated to 10.1.

From the version numbers as I understand them this should be good enough to give my Radeon HD 7790 an acceptable radeon driver. I guess I'll report back if smoke starts billowing out of my case. I don't know that I would be using the radeonSI stuff anymore, so I gather I can disable my xorg.conf.

Section "Module"
Load "dri2"
Load "glamoregl"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "ati" # was radeon
Driver "ati" # was radeib
Option "AccelMethod" "glamor"
EndSection

[Praxis]

Nevermind, I installed 3.14rc2 from here: http://linuxg.net/how-to-install-ker...elementary-os/

Big improvement on the open source driver (presumably radeonSI). With the oibaf/graphics-drivers stack I can now do KDE Desktop Effects (fusion-icon still segfaults, but it does that on all 13.10 installs I've seen regardless of graphics card or driver). 1080p plays fine. 2D movement is fluid and decent.

I just hope that 3.14 gets in to Trusty Tahr (or the important bits are backported in to 3.13) and I'll be able to rely on the LVM, etc. in the repository instead of having to enable a development repository with ginormous package churn and occasional regressions.

I guess I can finally start messing around with those games I got this card to play.

[Praxis]

You have a Bonaire IIRC, so I don't think 3.13 kernels enable DPM for you. You can pick up a 3.13 final kernel and manually enable dpm, or (probably better) pick up an early 3.14 kernel (eg agd5f's drm-next-3.14 branch) which has some CI dpm fixes *and* enables DPM on CI by default. You'll also need current userspace bits from the repos.

For what it's worth, all the people telling you great things about 3.13 + repos with their SI cards are telling the truth, but CI DPM is running about 1/2 a kernel release behind SI DPM.

Not quite pre-chewed enough of a suggestion for my week teeth. I googled the paranthetical 'eg' and found this page, but I have no idea to cull a kernel out of it.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/linux/log/?h=drm-next-3.14-wip

[bridgman]

Where are you folks getting your 3.13 kernels? The repos? I used an early 3.13 kernel and it seemed about the same as 3.12, i.e., not great.

You have a Bonaire IIRC, so I don't think 3.13 kernels enable DPM for you. You can pick up a 3.13 final kernel and manually enable dpm, or (probably better) pick up an early 3.14 kernel (eg agd5f's drm-next-3.14 branch) which has some CI dpm fixes *and* enables DPM on CI by default. You'll also need current userspace bits from the repos.

For what it's worth, all the people telling you great things about 3.13 + repos with their SI cards are telling the truth, but CI DPM is running about 1/2 a kernel release behind SI DPM.

[Praxis]

yes update the kernal to 3.13 and run the latest oibaf PPA and you will see amazing improvements.

im running a lower spec gpu than you (trinity APU) and the new updates are giving me fps silky smooth more than i have seen on windows. vsync works, AA works.

Where are you folks getting your 3.13 kernels? The repos? I used an early 3.13 kernel and it seemed about the same as 3.12, i.e., not great.