I've been having slowdowns/freezes in Ubuntu only after upgrading to 12.04 LTS. I'm using an AMD Athlon II X2, 3GB Ram and an ATI Radeon HD5670.
My PC freezes randomly and I suspect that it's really the graphics card/drivers. I've tried using the 'additional drivers' option to install the graphics driver but it was giving me slowdowns/freezes. Then I tried installing fglrx through the command line and still had freezes. I've also tried the driver that comes from AMD's website, but still the same result.Then after reading some articles, I've tried installing the driver from Ubuntu-x(https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates), but still freezes are random. Here are the details after running fglrxinfo and glxinfo.
$glxinfo
server glx vendor string: ATI
server glx version string: 1.4
$fglrxinfo
OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI Radeon HD 5670
I'm using Gnome by the way, but I've also tried out Unity and at first it was running smoothly, but same result after a few hours. I've also noticed that compiz was taking a huge amount of CPU usage. I've also done few workarounds like setting the force full screen redraw and other stuff but didn't work. I don't think my graphics card is broken because it's running fine in Windows.
Could it be that I messed up the installations and got some sort of leftovers from each? I know that I purged fglrx cleanly after installing. Is there a way to completely reset my graphics card drivers?
Is anyone here also experiencing the same problems with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and ATI cards? I'm not sure what's the next step. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Update:
I apparently installed the open source driver incorrectly, and I was actually using fglrx. I installed the open source driver and am still monitoring the performance.