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I'm using a laptop with a mobility radeon hd 540v. I'd like to install the driver recommended by the AMD website. Is that fine or should I install one from the "additional drivers" menu? Do I have to deactivate anything first? I'm asking because I'd like to get the full performance out of my card.

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the driver from the "additional drivers" menu is actually the AMD one. It could be that it is not the latest driver, but at least it's a driver known to work with your Ubuntu version. And also, installing it from the "additional drivers" menu is very easy, while installing the driver from the ATI website can be tiresome and tricky.

So, I would install it from the "additional drivers" menu. That's the propietary ATI driver and will give you 3D accelleration.

Good luck!

ps: if the menu shows the choice between two drivers (one normal one and one saying 'post-install updates'), do NOT install the post-install updates. That has been known to break systems in some cases and give lots of error messages.

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Open the terminal and type:

ubuntu-drivers devices  

The results will show a list of proprietary AMD/ATI graphics drivers, one of which has the word Recommended appearing after it. Install the recommended proprietary graphics driver from the default Ubuntu repositories and then reboot the computer to enable the graphics driver.

The proprietary AMD graphics drivers from the official AMD website sometimes have marginal performance improvements over proprietary AMD graphics drivers from the Ubuntu repositories, however this comes at a cost of increased risk of problems, including boot failure. The real advantage of installing the proprietary AMD graphics drivers from the official AMD website is that they sometimes work better with very new models of GPUs because they are more up-to-date than the proprietary AMD graphics drivers that come from the default Ubuntu repositories.

Note: If you have already installed a proprietary graphics driver that you downloaded from the official AMD website, the command: ubuntu-drivers devices will automatically show it as the recommended driver, so if you want to know the recommended proprietary AMD graphics driver that comes from the default Ubuntu repositories, you have to uninstall the proprietary graphics driver that you downloaded from the official AMD website before you run ubuntu-drivers devices in order to show this information in the terminal.

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