Open source driver support for mobile AMD graphics

[kgonzales]

I am looking at the Lenovo Y40-80 with has an AMD Radeon R9 M275 4GB video card. How well are the mobile AMD graphics cards supported with the open source drivers as of today? I believe this is a Cape Verde based cars, so its a GCN1.0 architecture.

[zakhrov]

The Open Source drivers do work with the mobile GPUs However you have to have Mesa 11 and kernel 4.2 for the best performance. GPU switching using the DRI_PRIME variable works well enough on my laptop (An Compaq Presario CQ62 308-AX with the Radeon HD4250 IGP and the Radeon HD5470 CEDAR discrete graphics) I don't know how well it works on Intel+AMD solutions. Since the R9 M275 is based on Cape Verde it should work well enough with the radeonsi driver. You would have to use catalyst if it was a Tonga or Fiji based chip.

[kgonzales]

Thanks for the response zakhrov! I am planning to use Fedora 23 on it which will have both Mesa 11.0.x and kernel 4.2.x included at release. The fact that it is using the Cape Verde chip and can therefore use the open source radeon driver is one of my prime motivators for buying this laptop.