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My son bought a game on Steam the other day, but is having issues updating the graphics drivers to use the game.

He has an AMD A4-7300 which has the HD 8430 graphics in it.

I'm sure we downloaded the right set of drivers from the AMD website, but every time it unpacks, the system gives a failure. I asked him to take a screen shot of the end result and here it is:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1GNnCcfB7M5MlhpeFh6R3IySWQzVm81VldUVVNBaWVpRks0

Any help is greatly appreciated.

The OS is Linux Mint.

You have to use Mesa R600 drivers for your onboard GPU. HD8XXX is fairly outdated and uses no more than OpenGL 3.3 extensions. Although there is effort to emulate FP64 texture support via software to make these chips OpenGL 4.1 compatible I don't think it is enough to justify their usage for modern games.

I would suggest you to add a discrete NVIDIA or GCN 1.2 or higher Radeon to play your games.

fglrx drivers are no longer supported on any recent linux distro.

Craptastic Linux driver support for AMD GPUs is what pushed me back to Nvidia.

AMD drivers have been open sourced and have come a VERY long way in the last year or so. The performance via the open source AMDGPU driver is quite good, and getting better daily.

What you'll need to run the latest graphics stack (the driver is completely contained within these two packages, no need to install anything catalyst):
A newer kernel
updated Mesa.

a few questions before we get started:
1. Which release of Mint are you running?
2. Which kernel are you running? terminal command: uname -r
3. Which Mesa release are you running? terminal command: glxinfo | grep "OpenGL version"

turtlepwr281 wrote:

AMD drivers have been open sourced and have come a VERY long way in the last year or so. The performance via the open source AMDGPU driver is quite good, and getting better daily.

What you'll need to run the latest graphics stack (the driver is completely contained within these two packages, no need to install anything catalyst):
A newer kernel
updated Mesa.

a few questions before we get started:
1. Which release of Mint are you running?
2. Which kernel are you running? terminal command: uname -r
3. Which Mesa release are you running? terminal command: glxinfo | grep "OpenGL version"

I will find all that out once I get home later.

The newer AMD Linux graphics drivers are excellent, but that's old enough (different enough) hardware to be entirely unsupported by the good drivers. For this hardware, drivers are probably always going to be a mess, and even when the drivers are in top shape any gaming at all is likely to be a pretty bad experience. If a graphics card upgrade is at all an option (excellent cards can be had for ~$90), it would be the better way to go.

If sticking with this hardware, one more thing to know before proceeding is that there tend to be a couple of graphics driver options for Linux for any given hardware. Usually there's an official one provided by the manufacturer of the card, and an open-source one which represents the community's best effort to emulate what the official driver does. In this case, the open-source one is missing a few features, but the AMD-provided one is a bug-ridden mess. You should make doubly sure that the open-source one (which should already be installed) is incapable of doing what you want before looking at the AMD-provided one.

To hopefully disambiguate, the old open-source driver is simply called ATI or Radeon, the old AMD-provided driver is Catalyst or fglrx, the new open-source one (too new for your hardware) is AMDGPU, and the new AMD-provided one is AMDGPU-PRO (AMDGPU versus AMDGPU-PRO is a bit more complex than that, but that's all irrelevant here).

What turtlepwr is saying may still make ATI/Radeon a bit more capable than it is, depending on how old your kernel is now. Little effort has gone into those drivers recently though, as AMDGPU is better in every way and the hardware not supported by it is very old.

To install Catalyst (back to your direct question), a .run file is going to be something you want to try to execute, rather than open in a text editor (but opening it in a text editor still makes enough sense to show you what you see there, because the early part of it is an interpreted script rather than a binary). The file manager will probably have some option to execute it, but you may have to give it execute (x) permissions before that will show up. The file manager should also provide some way to edit permissions.

It's tough to help in a more detailed way without knowing which file manager you're using (without resorting to the command line) - if you know which it is, that would be helpful.

Simplest way to execute that file (make sure it is decompressed first, if it was downloaded in a compressed format like .zip or .gz):

1. Open a CLI window, navigate to the directory where the file is located, and elevate to root.

2. chmod +x name-of-file

3. ./name-of-file

As was said earlier (thanks JBI for the step-by-step), you'll need to actually execute the file you downloaded from a terminal using 'sh'/'bash' or just setting the executable bits and running it. The old AMD drivers (and maybe the new ones too) are packaged as a self-extracting executable shell script/archive. There's a giant binary blob of compressed driver mixed in with the script that your editor is getting confused by.

Depending on the Mint version, the game in question, and the game's required OpenGL support level, you may be better off just updating the built-in Mesa drivers with something like the padoka stable PPA (https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dia ... untu/pkppa), or if you're feeling adventurous the unstable ppa (https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dia ... buntu/mesa) which is built fairly often from the upstream source repository (ignoring the release process, just building the latest upstream code).

AMD stopped supporting the TeraScale architecture a few years ago (Nov 2015), so the newest driver you'll be able to download from AMD will be from then. If your game doesn't absolutely require it, I'd avoid installing the AMD driver and just use the community/Mesa driver (AMD does employ people to work on the Mesa driver for both current and their legacy chips). The old AMD driver was enough of a mess that the community driver is actually usually faster than the AMD-supplied one, has less show-stopping bugs, but does occasionally miss a feature that some games rely on (compatibility profile for GL 3.2+ being one that until recently was missing).

synthtel2 wrote:

The newer AMD Linux graphics drivers are excellent, but that's old enough (different enough) hardware to be entirely unsupported by the good drivers. For this hardware, drivers are probably always going to be a mess, and even when the drivers are in top shape any gaming at all is likely to be a pretty bad experience. If a graphics card upgrade is at all an option (excellent cards can be had for ~$90), it would be the better way to go.

If sticking with this hardware, one more thing to know before proceeding is that there tend to be a couple of graphics driver options for Linux for any given hardware. Usually there's an official one provided by the manufacturer of the card, and an open-source one which represents the community's best effort to emulate what the official driver does. In this case, the open-source one is missing a few features, but the AMD-provided one is a bug-ridden mess. You should make doubly sure that the open-source one (which should already be installed) is incapable of doing what you want before looking at the AMD-provided one.

To hopefully disambiguate, the old open-source driver is simply called ATI or Radeon, the old AMD-provided driver is Catalyst or fglrx, the new open-source one (too new for your hardware) is AMDGPU, and the new AMD-provided one is AMDGPU-PRO (AMDGPU versus AMDGPU-PRO is a bit more complex than that, but that's all irrelevant here).

What turtlepwr is saying may still make ATI/Radeon a bit more capable than it is, depending on how old your kernel is now. Little effort has gone into those drivers recently though, as AMDGPU is better in every way and the hardware not supported by it is very old.

To install Catalyst (back to your direct question), a .run file is going to be something you want to try to execute, rather than open in a text editor (but opening it in a text editor still makes enough sense to show you what you see there, because the early part of it is an interpreted script rather than a binary). The file manager will probably have some option to execute it, but you may have to give it execute (x) permissions before that will show up. The file manager should also provide some way to edit permissions.

It's tough to help in a more detailed way without knowing which file manager you're using (without resorting to the command line) - if you know which it is, that would be helpful.

I did not realize at which point AMDGPU stopped supporting which hardware. Thanks for the clarification!

Veerappan wrote:

AMD stopped supporting the TeraScale architecture a few years ago (Nov 2015), so the newest driver you'll be able to download from AMD will be from then.

Seriously...? The APU mentioned in the OP was released in 2014! If they're only going to provide official support for less than 2 years, that's pretty lame.

8000-series should in a sane world represent GCN parts across the board, but this one's Terascale-based.

Edit: it is not. I looked at the GPU model instead of the CPU model given, and they don't match.

lex-ington, is the GPU an 8470D, or a dedicated card? If it's an 8470D, the situation is a lot better than I've been painting it.

OK, so it should be supported by recent versions of the official drivers, then?

I had been using wikipedia as my source for the CPU/GPU combination:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_A ... processors

The A4-7300 is claimed as TeraScale 3 (Richland, released in 2013 2014, with a piledriver CPU) and that page links to the AMD product page:
https://products.amd.com/en-us/search/A ... D-8470D/30

If that system isn't VLIW4 (basically mini-cayman without DP float), I'd be surprised.

And yes, there was quite an uproar at the time that AMD was discontinuing driver support for the VLIW4/5 chips so soon after some of the systems with them shipped... I believe that AMD-based OEMs may actually have been still shipping those chips in systems at the time they discontinued driver support (both in Windows and *NIX).

Veerappan wrote:

The A4-7300 is claimed as TeraScale 3 (Richland, released in 2013, with a piledriver CPU) and that page links to the AMD product page:
https://products.amd.com/en-us/search/A ... D-8470D/30

Most of the hits I'm finding around the web indicate A4-7300 was released in Q3 2014, not 2013.

just brew it! wrote:

Veerappan wrote:

The A4-7300 is claimed as TeraScale 3 (Richland, released in 2013, with a piledriver CPU) and that page links to the AMD product page:
https://products.amd.com/en-us/search/A ... D-8470D/30

Most of the hits I'm finding around the web indicate A4-7300 was released in Q3 2014, not 2013.

Yeah, you're right about that. Richland in general was launched in 2013, but this specific model was August 2014.

Ah, and I was still confused because the A4-7300 is actually a chip that belongs in 6000-series APU naming. They probably still had too much stock of one of the older chips. It's confirmable as Terascale because AMD's pages for the GCN-based APUs note DX12 support.

In short, Veerappan's got it and AMDGPU is straight out.

JBI, AMDGPU support does go back to early GCN, it just isn't the default until Volcanic Islands for some reason.

Stupid confusing model numbering schemes...

Even though Intel's are much better, the ARK allows me to forgive alot of sins.

PS, whatever happened to T-R's old decoder ring for CPU's/GPU's?

synthtel2 wrote:

Ah, and I was still confused because the A4-7300 is actually a chip that belongs in 6000-series APU naming. They probably still had too much stock of one of the older chips. It's confirmable as Terascale because AMD's pages for the GCN-based APUs note DX12 support.

Yeah, AMD's radeon model numbering requires a decoder-ring. The 7000-series desktop cards weren't all GCN either. The 7730 was the lowest GCN chip in that series, anything lower is still Terascale as well. The R5/7/9 200-series is the worst example. It's a mix of TeraScale and GCN generations 1-3... horrible.

And yeah, for Radeons, DX11 being listed on the AMD pages is a good sign of the card being pre-GCN.

turtlepwr281 wrote:

AMD drivers have been open sourced and have come a VERY long way in the last year or so. The performance via the open source AMDGPU driver is quite good, and getting better daily.

What you'll need to run the latest graphics stack (the driver is completely contained within these two packages, no need to install anything catalyst):
A newer kernel
updated Mesa.

a few questions before we get started:
1. Which release of Mint are you running?
2. Which kernel are you running? terminal command: uname -r
3. Which Mesa release are you running? terminal command: glxinfo | grep "OpenGL version"

The kernel running is 4.8.0.53-generic

The Mesa release running is 3.0 Mesa 17.0.7

The Mint version is: Linux mint 18.2 Cinnamon 64-bit

That's recent enough that the open-source driver is probably about as good as it's going to get, unfortunately. Running the Catalyst installer you downloaded should probably be the next thing to try. We can provide instructions for the graphical interface if we know what the file manager is (maybe someone else here does?) or more detailed instructions for the command line.

Mint 18.2 is a bit old (released July '17) and isn't even the newest in the v18 series. Version 19 came out a couple weeks ago and might have a better video driver, so I'd upgrade were I you.

Here's instructions for how: https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2416

It won't hurt anything, it just seems unlikely the old driver has gotten serious improvements since then (not that I've been following it closely or anything). AMDGPU was already good enough for everyone to be focusing on it in July 2017.

So take this with a heavy dose of salt, since it appears that your hardware may be too old to be compliant with the new open source drivers (AMDGPU).

These new drivers should be able to be installed in Mint 18.2 by adding:

-Kernel 4.15 or newer, which you can install using Ukuu (google ukuu mint to get the PPA)

-The most recent Mesa releases, which you can get from the Padoka PPA.

Mint 19 ships with kernel 4.15 and Mesa 18.0 which, if your chip is supported, should provide acceptable open source driver support.

/here ends my knowledge.

So the funny yet embarrassing part in all of this is....The updates to the core system was turned off (by default)....Linux was not updating at all for this whole time....you'ld think I would know this but no, I missed it.

Started running the updates last night around 10....son still updating.

Crying shame