Updated and Optimized Ubuntu Free Graphics Drivers

[ungutknut]

Fount it! Was an xorg-edger ppa what wasn't removed cleanly.

I shall feast in OpenGL features now!

How did you find out? And how did you remove it cleanly? I have the same problem (glxinfo says I only have opengl 3.0 and no "oibaf" in the vendor line) and think a former xorg-edgers ppa could also be the cause. I already made a ppa-purge with xorg-edgers and oibaf, reinstalled oibaf ppa... but things still go wrong.

For example I can't start steam with the oibaf ppa anymore. The system hardlocks instantly when I try to do this. Unigine valley also doesn't start anymore - not even overriding the opengl-version doesn't help here.

[abelthorne]

I've tried to use the PPA a few times these days but encountered a few issues with the current version of Mesa 10.3 (ATI RadeonHD 7770 GPU):
- in XCOM Enemy Unknown a few days ago, random and complete system freeze (whith the game still running, with choppy sound and computer completely unresponsive − had to make a hard reset)
- in Civilization V today, the game crashed randomly (might have been linked with the fact that Steam displayed a message for a trading card, as the crash happened just after)
And a few problems of graphic garbage on the desktop and Steam interface, in specific zones. Also, the Firefox window completely trashed when opening a terminal window on Unity.

It looks like the driver is quite unusable currently. Have people encountered similar bugs in games recently (the XCOM one was pretty naughty)?

[axfelix]

Unfortunately, that's just because you've got an AMD card. It's been the case for several years now that the only way you're going to get Windows-comparable performance and stability under Linux in modern titles like the two Firaxis ports you mentioned is when using Intel's open source drivers (available from this PPA), or nVidia's closed-source drivers (available in other sources). AMD is unfortunately stuck somewhere in the middle; their open-source driver is much better than the nVidia equivalent in that it's actually more or less usable for gaming up to a few generations back (last I checked the newest really-recommended video card to use with it was the Radeon HD 4000 series), but their closed-source driver really isn't much better, so you're not going to be able to get an nVidia-comparable or Windows-comparable experience out of that card under Linux anytime soon.

There's been talk of AMD porting Mantle over to Linux since their driver stack is in such bad shape currently, but nothing has come of that yet.

[gutigen]

I've tried to use the PPA a few times these days but encountered a few issues with the current version of Mesa 10.3 (ATI RadeonHD 7770 GPU):
- in XCOM Enemy Unknown a few days ago, random and complete system freeze (whith the game still running, with choppy sound and computer completely unresponsive − had to make a hard reset)
- in Civilization V today, the game crashed randomly (might have been linked with the fact that Steam displayed a message for a trading card, as the crash happened just after)
And a few problems of graphic garbage on the desktop and Steam interface, in specific zones. Also, the Firefox window completely trashed when opening a terminal window on Unity.

It looks like the driver is quite unusable currently. Have people encountered similar bugs in games recently (the XCOM one was pretty naughty)?

Bug in XCOM is being worked on by Mesa devs:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80419

Those desktop glitches happened after today's update though, hopefully will get sorted soon enough.

[oibaf]

Dropping Ubuntu 13.10

Ubuntu 13.10 reaches End of Life on July 17. PPAs for 13.10 will also be disabled, so if you still want to have updated drivers you should upgrade to 14.04.

[Guest]

Hmm, is there anything I could do to use llvm 3.5 with Ubuntu 14.04, maybe from a PPA? From my limited understanding, it seems llvm 3.5 is required for SI hardware to avoid that LLVM register error with certain games, and for additional performance.

[gutigen]

Hmm, is there anything I could do to use llvm 3.5 with Ubuntu 14.04, maybe from a PPA? From my limited understanding, it seems llvm 3.5 is required for SI hardware to avoid that LLVM register error with certain games, and for additional performance.

Aside from manually compiling Mesa with llvm3.5, the only thing we can do is wait and hope that Oibaf will use llvm3.5 to build packages in his repo soon enough

[NightmareMan]

Hi guys. Today I've installed fresh Mint 17 Cinnamon x64. Also installed Oibaf drivers, Steam and Dota2.
First, the problem was with 2 libraries that was already discussed and resolved here. I mean libgcc_s.so.1 and libstdc++.so.6 (caused direct rendering error on Steam startup), I resolved this problem.
Second, trying to launch Dota2, I had issue with S3TC support. As it was said here, I launched steam with

force_s3tc_enable=true steam

and Dota2 finally launched. But now the next problem - FPS. On Windows I have stable smooth 60 fps (Vsync on) even in big battles. But on Mint I have 25-30 FPS with same video settings.
Is it possible to do something to increase FPS? I have Radeon HD7770.
Help me please. Dota is the only thing why I'm not fully on Linux

[Guest]

Hi guys. Today I've installed fresh Mint 17 Cinnamon x64. Also installed Oibaf drivers, Steam and Dota2.
First, the problem was with 2 libraries that was already discussed and resolved here. I mean libgcc_s.so.1 and libstdc++.so.6 (caused direct rendering error on Steam startup), I resolved this problem.
Second, trying to launch Dota2, I had issue with S3TC support. As it was said here, I launched steam with

force_s3tc_enable=true steam

and Dota2 finally launched. But now the next problem - FPS. On Windows I have stable smooth 60 fps (Vsync on) even in big battles. But on Mint I have 25-30 FPS with same video settings.
Is it possible to do something to increase FPS? I have Radeon HD7770.
Help me please. Dota is the only thing why I'm not fully on Linux

Hmm, on my setup on Ubuntu 14.04 + 7850, I didn't have any issue with S3TC or have to do anything special with it with Dota 2. I would install mesa-utils and verify you're actually using oibaf's driver. Should have a line like OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 10.3.0-devel (git-8ff1611 trusty-oibaf-ppa) (the trusty-oibaf-ppa part confirming the use of oibaf's driver).

As for performance, it might help to also be using a relatively newer kernel. The newer the better (as long as it doesn't cause other issues; do keep your current kernel installed as a fallback); 3.16rc4 is pretty decent.

Should also check if dpm is being used or not. /var/log/dmesg should mention something like [ 5.801096] [drm] radeon: dpm initialized at some point. If not, then you could try forcing the use of dpm by adding radeon.dpm=1 to /etc/default/grub and then running update-grub afterwards (if using grub bootloader). Although if dpm isn't activated by-default for you, there could be a reason why (likely instability).

Another thing to try is to turn vsync off from within Dota 2. For some reason, Vsync is always automatically enabled for me on Dota 2, but unchecking the box turns it off. Could also try starting up Steam with vblank_mode=0 which in-turn should carry over to Dota 2.

For another FPS trick, I heard that disabling SwapBuffersWait allows for framerate in fullscreen applications to go past the refresh rate. Not sure if this is true, but you could try it by creating a /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-vblank.conf and adding the following to it:

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Radeon HD"
	Driver	"radeon"
	Option	"SwapBuffersWait"              "false"
EndSection

I know this works on Ubuntu + variants, but unsure of how it is on other distros.

Could also try using R600_DEBUG=hyperz but I'm unsure if this would help performance with Dota 2 or not.

And finally, someone mentioned the use of a boot command radeon.vm_block_size=12 which could help performance either slightly or significantly. Just add it in the same manner as that radeon.dpm=1 command above.

Those are just some of the various tweaks I've come across; some may or may not be needed or do anything. If anything listed isn't right, feel free to correct me

[asdfblah]

Hi guys. Today I've installed fresh Mint 17 Cinnamon x64. Also installed Oibaf drivers, Steam and Dota2.
First, the problem was with 2 libraries that was already discussed and resolved here. I mean libgcc_s.so.1 and libstdc++.so.6 (caused direct rendering error on Steam startup), I resolved this problem.
Second, trying to launch Dota2, I had issue with S3TC support. As it was said here, I launched steam with

force_s3tc_enable=true steam

and Dota2 finally launched. But now the next problem - FPS. On Windows I have stable smooth 60 fps (Vsync on) even in big battles. But on Mint I have 25-30 FPS with same video settings.
Is it possible to do something to increase FPS? I have Radeon HD7770.
Help me please. Dota is the only thing why I'm not fully on Linux

Try:

vblank_mode=0 force_s3tc_enable=true steam