Ubuntu – Best driver for ATI Radeon HD4250

atiradeon

I am relatively new to Ubuntu. I saw my friend's PC running Ubuntu and tried it out of curiosity.

I started with 10.10 on my old PC with an nVidia 7300GS graphics card. It would occasionally freeze but other than that it was all good. (I was using the proprietary drivers)

But a month back I bought a new one (AMD X4 955BE/ 8 GB/ Radeon HD4250) and dual booted Win 7/ Ubuntu 11.04.

The issue is that the video performance is absolutely horrible. Even standard definition videos are unwatchably choppy. This is huge deal breaker for me, since I use my PC mostly for watching movies. I downloaded the proprietary drivers but it seemed like they dragged down the performance even more.

I also installed 11.04 on my friends laptop ( A dual core with Intel HD graphics and 2GB RAM), and it works like a dream. My friend says that she hasn't had to login to Windows 7 once in the last three weeks. 1080p videos play just fine without the need for any proprietary drivers.

I would like to know if there is anything else that I can try, because I really like Ubuntu and would like to have to login to windows only when I absolutely have to.

PS: I am using the Ubuntu 11.04/X64 whereas the one on my friend's laptop is the 32 bit version.

Best Answer

In many cases using the proprietary ATI provides better performance, if your graphics card is supported you should be able to select it from the "Additional Drivers" application.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – ATI proprietary driver performance

Im using an Packard Bell easynote TJ75 with a ati mobility radeon HD5650, and its not bad at all.

Compiz benchmark is around 500~600 frames/sec, i can play good World of Warcraft or Call of duty MW 4 (under wine), for example (well, there is some slowdown sometimes).

BTW, im using the experimental drivers:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu lucid main 
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu lucid main
http://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x3B22AB97AF1CDFA9

Sometimes compiz has some issue (for example, does not load the windows icons, minimixe, maximize and close), but i dont know if this is really related with the ati card.

I have an ati on my desktop too, with ubuntu 9.10 no kind of driver used to works, with ubuntu 10.04 it works perfectly.

Here's a screenshot for you, with the compiz expo effect: alt text

As you see, ati card and drivers does not work bad at all.

Ubuntu – AMD 11.12 driver issue

You are missing some packages to be able to build your drivers, please install them before trying to rebuild the drivers again. Open a terminal and type

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

After these are installed you can then execute sh ./amd-driver-installer-12-1-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/oneiric to build the packages and sudo dpkg -i fglrx*.deb to install them.

Please make sure that any old version of the drivers is already removed from the system

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

will remove any previous installed versions at the moment in your system, dont worry if they give faults, just move on.

For a complete step by step guide on how to remove / revert / install the AMD driver visit this post

Is my ATI graphics card supported in Ubuntu?

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