I have installed Ubuntu 16.04 (first serious attempt with Linux) but I'm having trouble finding the right graphics drivers. My system has an AMD Radeon HD 8470d graphics card on an AMD A4-7300 APU. Looking on the AMD site, their driver only supports up to Ubuntu 14.04
Currently there doesn't seem to be any graphics driver installed. I tried:
lshw -c video
but it doesn't list any drivers installed. Same with:
lspci 0nnk | grep -i vga -A3
just lists "Kernel modules: radeon" but no driver.
In some programs my graphics driver is being listed as VMware Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe. I googled this and it's a software renderer, so it looks like my poor CPU is handling the graphics for now which explains the terrible performance all round.
When I look at Additional Drivers it just finds one unknown device and gives two options:
-Using Processor microcode firmware for AMD CPUs from amd64-microcode (proprietary)
-Do not use the device
Doesn't seem to make much difference which of these I select. Neither breaks the computer, but neither fixes the problems or seems to improve performance in any way, shape or form.
Is there some solution to this within 16.04? Or should I just re-install with 14.04 so that I can use the official drivers?
EDIT:
I looked into installing the Radeon Opensource Driver as suggested. I found this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver and since my card isn't listed in the supported chipsets I ran the recommended test command:
dmesg | egrep 'drm|radeon'
It returned the following:
[ 1.331659] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810
[ 1.367284] [drm] VGACON disable radeon kernel modesetting.
[ 1.367306] [drm:radeon_init [radeon]] ERROR No UMS support in radeon module!
[ 7.918783] [drm] VGACON disable radeon kernel modesetting.
[ 7.918805] [drm:radeon_init [radeon]] ERROR No UMS support in radeon module!
I might give the open source driver a go anyway before I roll back to 14.04. But I'll wait and see if there are any more suggestions first.
Best Answer
The proprietary driver
fglrxis no longer supported by amd and you can't use it in ubuntu 16.04 (due to xorg and kernel versions). The alternative is theamdgpuopensource driver which your system will use it automatically if your gpu supported it. Since it doesn't seem to support it you only have theradeonopensource driver. If you needfglrxthen yes, the only solution is installing ubuntu 14.04.Some links to verify this (suggested by @Mark Kirby via comment) are here:
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/03/09/2049232/ubuntu-drops-support-for-amds-catalyst-gpu-driver
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/ubuntu-drops-amd-catalyst-fglrx-driver-16-04