How to enable Unity 3D support in 12.04 using open-source drivers for RadeonHD cards?

Question

As the title says I can't enable the Unity 3D support when I'm using open-source drivers (xorg-edgers). I have an xfx Radeon HD 6950 by the way.

If I install the proprietary 12.3 drivers from AMD it works, but I get poorer 2D performance than the open-source drivers and also I get some freezes and lock ups at random. So because of this I'm trying the open-source drivers and so far no issues at all, except this one.

Running this command $ /usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p shows this:

OpenGL vendor string:   VMware, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 0x300)
OpenGL version string:  2.1 Mesa 8.0.2

Not software rendered:    no
Not blacklisted:          yes
GLX fbconfig:             yes
GLX texture from pixmap:  yes
GL npot or rect textures: yes
GL vertex program:        yes
GL fragment program:      yes
GL vertex buffer object:  yes
GL framebuffer object:    yes
GL version is 1.4+:       yes

Unity 3D supported:       no

And this command $ lspci -nn | grep VGA shows:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Cayman PRO [Radeon HD 6950] [1002:6719]

So, is this normal? Do I need to go back to proprietary drivers to enable Unity 3D?

If anyone can give me help, I'll much appreciate it.

Answer 1

I was having same problem with an integrated Radeon 4250 (RS880) and solved it after installing also the xserver-xorg-video-ati package.

I read in the info about the package that:

"Users of Rage, Mach, or Radeon boards may remove this package only if they use Driver "r128", "mach64", or "radeon" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf instead of relying on autodetection."

So it seems I was using autodetection.

Now I get 3D acceleration (and Unity 3D) although I noticed the mouse cursor is not smooth at the login screen (it freezes for a fraction of a second each one second).