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I just changed to Ubuntu 11.10 and I have had a painful experience trying to configure the onboard VGA. I read a lot of articles here and in the web, looked everywhere, but I didn find a fix for it. Well, here goes my system specs:

  • Processor: AMD Phenom II 1090T Six cores
  • Memory: 4 GB of Ram
  • Graphics: Radeon HD 4290 onboard (512 MB shared)

For my surprise, the system is very laggy, the windows move slow when I grab and move them around, the scroll of Firefox is not fluid, I tried some games and emulators to test, open-msx run games but not fluid, ScummVM is the same story. When I open more than one window then it became more slow, Xara XL and Gimp get laggy after I do some work with them (the more filters I apply, the more slow the O.S. gets).

Well, I tried the driver that came with the install, the proprietary driver from additional drivers, the last version of Catalyst from AMD web site (the driver installs, but when I try to use Catalyst it says there iś no driver installed), I unmarked VSync in CCSM, and nothing changed. In my System Info tab, the graphics appears as VESA:RS880, I read there is some options for the driver: VESA, ATI, RADEON, RADEON HD as far as I can remember, VESA is more compatible but doesn't have acceleration and RADEON has good 2D and 3D acceleration for the system, so I tried to install a radeon driver but my system couldn't be accessed anymore, so I had to format again.

Sorry for the big text, but I spent some days trying to figure it out, I read a lot of stuff, I looked here, to see if there was someone with the same problem and VGA I have, but couldn't find anything. What am I doing wrong? Is there any other driver to make my VGA works better? Am I using the wrong Ubuntu version? I use Xara XL, Gimp, Inkscape and Blender a lot, so I am very worried about this and I know that my specs can give much more than I have now.

User051209
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Lord Avallon
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4 Answers4

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Have the same problems while using Ubuntu, except that i have another ATI videocard, 5770 HD. Install the latest ATI driver from AMD website, i prefer to create deb files and install drivers this way. I think this link is good for you: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.42&lang=English Manual installing tutorial on this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI

And then after drivers installed try to replace the Device block in your xorg.conf file with this one:

Section "Device"
 Identifier "ATI Radeon"
 Driver "ati"
 Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
 Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
 Option "AccelDFS" "true"
 Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
 Option "EnableDepthMoves" "true"
EndSection

It's working for me and I have very smooth windows! Also save Sync to VBlank off and auto frame rate count in composite off too.

xelblch
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In Ubuntu you can find the appropriate additional required drivers.

  • Open Additional Drivers from System Settings.
  • Click Activate and them Authenticate it with your password.
  • Wait while it download and install the drivers.

If this does not solve your problem, then you have to try searching for any other solution.

:)

Have you tried this http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/drivers .

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Try using Ubuntu 10.04 perhaps a Long Term Support version will do, I've not tested it but you could try in another partition.

Have you used another version of Ubuntu? If so, the problem existed before?

Regards (:

victorhqc
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Maybe a stupid question: are you sure your cpu settings in your bios are not set to single core? Had similar issues running HD videos with my radeon (catalyst driver) in unity untill I figured out that I had my 2nd core locked in my bios. Eversince I fixed that, everything seems to run just perfect! My system details always used to display the cpu name correctly, never knew it was supposed to say x2 at the end (x6 in your case). IMO unity 3d should work just fine with the catalyst driver but I could be wrong.

Rich
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