Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, SecretSquirrel
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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"