Is my ATI graphics card supported in Ubuntu?

Question

I have an ATI graphics card and I want to know if it is supported and what kind of drivers should I be running to get the best features out of it.

Is my card supported in Ubuntu and what drivers will work with my card?

Answer 1

Officially Supported Hardware

To check if your card is supported visit this site.

If you card is not listed there then probably it is too new and simply is not supported by any ATI driver.

Installation of the drivers

Before installing any drivers you need to install some dependencies to your system, do this by running this command

sudo apt-get install build-essential cdbs fakeroot dh-make debhelper debconf libstdc++6 dkms libqtgui4 wget execstack libelfg0 dh-modaliases

Official binary packages from Ubuntu

To install the fglrx packages supplied by Ubuntu open a terminal and install using

sudo apt-get install fglrx fglrx-amdcccle

or search for the Additional Drivers utility in your dash and install one of the detected drivers from the list.

Latest version provided by Ubuntu's Additional Drivers tool (up to this edit's date) is 11.10.

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Official ATI binaries from the ATI site

To install the latest ATI 12.6 drivers follow this, people are reporting that updating their driver solves some problems with Unity and Gnome-Shell

You will need to remove all the current fglrx packages from your system and download the driver from the ATI site.

Remove the fglrx drivers if previously installed them (if any of these returns errors ie: file not found, package not found ignore it)

sudo sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh
sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglrx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev*

Download the newest ATI driver (current version is 12.6)

wget http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/amd-driver-installer-12-6-x86.x86_64.run

If you have a 64 bit system, then install this before anything

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Once downloaded go to the file location and set it to run as executable

cd /path_of_the_file
chmod 755 amd-driver-installer-12-3-x86.x86_64.run

For 32/64 bit Ubuntu use these steps to install

sh ./amd-driver-installer-12-3-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/oneiric
sudo dpkg -i fglrx*.deb

Once the driver is installed you need to start up a new xorg.conf file with this command

sudo aticonfig --initial -f

Reboot

sudo reboot

Revert back to the open source drivers

After installing drivers from deb packages

Remove all the fglrx traces from your system:

sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglrx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev*

Remove your xorg.conf

sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Reinstall xorg

For 32bits systems

sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-core libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri

For 64bits systems

sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:amd64 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64 xserver-xorg-core

Configure Xorg

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Reboot:

sudo reboot

After the reboot all the fglrx packages will be gone, you will be using default ones.

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After installing drivers from ATI binary

Remove all the ATI driver files:

sudo sh /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh

Remove your xorg.conf

sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Reinstall xorg

For 32bits systems

sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-core libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri

For 64bits systems

sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:amd64 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64 xserver-xorg-core

Configure Xorg

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Reboot:

sudo reboot

After the reboot all the fglrx drivers will be gone, you will be using default ones.

Answer 2

I have found that the default, open driver works best with my ATI card (5450). I had installed a proprietary driver that Ubuntu recommends, but had issues with shutdown crashing. I uninstalled the proprietary driver, and I don't notice any difference in performance at all, but all I use it for is the Compiz effects, no games.

Answer 3

There's atleast three drivers available with newer ATI cards. THere's the open source driver. It's reliable but not always the fastest. THen there's the fglrx driver shipped with the operating system or from jockey. It's faster and propably working. And then there's the fglrx driver downloadable from ATI.

The open source drivers is actually quite good. Try that one first.