Ati Mobility Radeon 4670 Ubuntu Drivers

I have a Dell Studio XPS 1645.

I had Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit installed. However the ATI gfx card [ATI Mob Radeon 4670 ~ 1 GB DDR3] doesnt play well with the drivers off AMD's website OR the drivers the proprietary drivers you can get through ubuntu's Hardware Drivers Option.

When I use this, any videos I play has this horizontal line flickering kinda thing happeing. And that also happens when I drag windows are or when i use EXPO or any other compiz effect.

Note a Simple Workaround is to not install the drivers @ all. and thus not enabling compiz. However for simple aesthetic pleasure I would like some effects. As I use EXPO and SCALE effects to switch though my windows/workspaces quickly etc etc.

Has anyone found any working drivers or solutions to these issues?

 

fglrx sucks for video compositing. Your best bet is to not use the ATI drivers. Use the open-source ones. They radeon driver should support OpenGL. I'm pretty sure the Fedora Core 12 drivers support it at least.

If you do want to use the fglrx driver to get the best 3D performance out of your card, google around for some xorg.conf options and your video issues. I'm pretty sure there are some settings out there that fix those issues.

 

Keep fglrx but completely disable the desktop effects whenever you want to watch a video. fglrx doesn't really play nice with xgl and compiz when playing videos.

 

You may want to look here for some answers: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Jaunty_Installation_Guide
Good luck

 

I recall saying that in the next catalyst version, ati will support 2d graphics better in linux.

 

I'm gonna try this, if this fails i'll probably go cry in a corner lol.

Thnx all for help

 

Please, keep us posted.
I'm gonna try my luck with 4870x2 and see if there is a way to get CF working.
Even if just a single card works 70% of its capabilities - it's gonna be a huge improvement over my GTX280M SLI.

 

CF should work with fglrx. Why doesn't your 280M work in SLI? I'm pretty sure that the Nvidia drivers should have that working... Phoronix thinks it should have been working for the last 4 years or so.

 

True, but for some reason, me and 10 other M17x owners with 280s got the same problem: crappy SLI (working but very bad performance) and low performance in general, the GPUs never rise to more than 30% of their max clocks. It might be somehow connected to the chipset and mobo, but I'm too tired to try it again and again (7 re-installs and ALL available drivers)

 

And yes, I was encouraged by Phoronix tests of that Clevo machine with a single 280 card but was never able to get half of what they achieved during their lightsmark tests. Got 240FPS@1920rez with SLI and only 140 with a single card while they got 400+ with a single card.. I tried forcing the clocks with "Coolbits" option but it was impossible to even force them to...

 

Bad news:
After replacing the 280s with 4870s I can't even install Ubuntu 9.10, - black screen and reboot cycle....
Any Ideas? Any other distro that can be installed on a system with mobile 4870s?
I guess I could try installing Ubuntu with ATIs disabled running the 9400, but there's no guarantee that it will even boot after switching back to ATIs...

 

You might look into FC12. They've been kinda the center of the new open-source GPU work.

 

Thanks, gonna try it now.

 

Installed FC12, the latest Catalyst didn't work but their mesa drivers work much better and even have some 3D support allowing Compiz run smooth. Even though they are far from perfect and heat up the GPUs, I can at least boot into linux and work.
Thanks.

 

Glad to hear it. Check the Phoronix forums for some tweaks and such, I think they have some settings so that the cards actually run cooler: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=43

 

Thanks, will try it. Kinda harder to adjust to Fedora after being on Ubuntu for years... No synaptic...weaker community support...