Until I can get a working driver, that will get me working hardware acceleration. On ANY distro. I'm done.
Radeon HD 7950. SLOWER THAN ANYTHING.
/rant
You have to install the proprietary drivers.
I either get glitching graphics or crashes, or very low performance.
I used linux for quite a while... and then I got an AMD GPU. That's Why I only use Windows now, because AMD and everything but Windows is a no-go. Drivers and support just... suck.
I had the same issue with my 7790, I actually got better performance with an Nvidia GT520. An obvious driver issue; I was greatly disappointed because I couldn't use my new card with my favorite OS. (I reinstalled the OS as I have a dedicated root partition) The only way I was able to remedy the issue was to either use an older release, or use Ubuntu (It only worked with Unity, so that wasn't an option.)
What desktop environment are you using, and what distro; I might be able to steer you toward a distro that works well with a radeon card. Linux Mint may work for you.
I'm honestly not using linux now because of the same issue. I generally prefer Fedora, so I'll give Fedora 20 a shot when it's released near the end of November. I'm looking forward to the release of RHEL 7 which should be sometime before the end of the year. (Fedora 19 and 20 are releases that will contribute to RHEL 7)
Well I tried Ubintu, tons of artifacts when I installed drivers, both AMD and fglrx.
Opensuse kept crashing after the install, and when it would boot, GNOME 3 wouldn't load.
I tried Mandriva, but it wouldnt even load.
Which release of Ubuntu did you try? Ubuntu 12.04 worked the best for me, then you can install Gnome 3 or Cinnamon, which ever you prefer :) If you want the most recent video driver, I added the xorg-edgers ppa; which turned out to be the best option for me.
I don't know what people's problem is with Nvidia and linux, every Nvidia card I've used in linux had driver support and every amd/ATI card sucked, kinda like ALL AMD drivers, not a Nvidia fanboy, most of my cards have been AMD
I totally agree, like you I've been mainly an AMD guy; I purchased the low end Nvidia card so that my linux partition would run smoother since I ran into major issues running my AMD built in graphics. Now I have a decent AMD card and it runs worse than the low end Nvidia card. I think Mr.Torvalds needs to address AMD in a video rather than Nvidia.
Maybe we'll get some better performance when everything moves to wayland or mir (ubuntu 13.10), one can only hope. Although I think driver support will be very limited until around 14.04 most likely 14.10 and even then I'm sure there's no promises.
I wish i could use linux on my laptop, but the optimus support sucks, and bumblebee doesnt work for me correctly -_-
Sucks cause i kind need it for work as windows doesnt like SSH natively ( i dislike putty ) and I also have issues with lots and lots of websites needing login info and such that slows the laptop to crap...
Lolz Ubuntu. I tried 13.10 this weekend and it quite literally took me hours of hacking to get it to even start the display server and get it to work with the GTX680. Fact: the latest Ubuntu distros are rubbish when they are released, and after 12.04, their releases stayed rubbish. And it's not only that, jockey is a joke in comparison to for instance mhwd, and as always, manual hardware configuration for the best performance out of every part is the way to go. I do get the best performance out of Fedora and Arch with manual hardware configuration, and then I run powertop in several calibrating scenarios to let all hardware parts run comfortably and with less power. It does work fine out of the box, but it works even better with advanced tweaking. I get a lot more speed out of any piece of hardware in any of my systems in GNU/Linux than in any other operating system, like exponentially more, and it always stays stable. I did my Steam and Windows updates this weekend on my only windows install, and it took practically the entire day of downloading, installing, reinstalling updates that failed, cleaning the system, and making everything work with the newest GPU drivers. If I invest 2 hours of work in linux, which is a lot less time than doing a simple update in Windows, I get a high performance ultra tweaked system that does everything I want it to do and much more, with a lot less effort, a lot less frustration, a lot less clicks and key presses. But it's not done in the same way as the usual bug avoiding maneuvers that are required in Windows.
There is a reason why Manjaro is so popular for linux newbies: it works out of the box with all graphics driver, including bumblebee/optimus... not many distros provide that kind of preconfiguration, because proprietary drivers taint the kernel and make support very hard (technically impossible), but Manjaro still provides support even with proprietary driver issues, they test proprietary drivers, they preconfigure them, etc... whereas on most distros, if you mention proprietary drivers, you get a "good luck, don't call again", because the moment you install proprietary drivers, you taint the kernel, and there is technically nothing the community can do for you to help you, even if they wanted.
On my AMD cards, everything works fine, including HDMI audio, OpenCL (great FP acceleration from AMD cards!), 3D, all kinds of graphics hardware acceleration, now with 3.11 also power management (cards stay way cooler and use less current, whilst delivering even more performance with a lot more headroom so no framerate drops anymore).
As to RHEL, Fedora, SuSE, OpenSuSE, Arch, Manjaro, Xubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo, those are the main distros I use, I've never had a single graphics problem with AMD graphics cards in the last 1.5 years, whereas the latest nVidia drivers just are full of bugs, cards are not declared for OpenCL in the proprietary nVidia .so's, OpenCL and CUDA just don't work unless you hack you applications that call these functions, the cards run hot, all kinds of fuckups going on that require some corrective hacking, and the open source nvidia drivers are so slow that they are borderline unusable.
Also, I'm pretty sure a lot of "problems" in GNU/Linux are user error, it's a completely different system, it's much more powerful, I think a lot of people approach GNU/Linux like Windows and then get in trouble. Has anyone that has GPU driver issues in GNU/Linux ever taken 5 minutes to figure out what dependencies are, how the driver structure for GPUs in GNU/Linux works, why you should update your packages after installing a new graphics driver, why it's necessary to also install 32-bit libs on a 64-bit system if you're running Steam or 32-bit games? The thing with GNU/Linux is that it will always work, even if half of the libs and deps are missing, it will not bluescreen or crash (well, except Ubuntu 13.10), but the performance will not be very good, so people get the impression that the system doesn't perform. Well no, on the contrary, it performs really well for a system that fails half of the packages it needs to do the job as it should, it will still give you an immediate solution as well as it can, and it will not crash, unlike Windows, and that makes that some users just don't see the problems in the right perspective.
I don't get why you're whining instead of trying to fix the problem.
First thing I'd do is update the radeonsi driver. Install the 3.11 kernel, compile and build mesa. This won't boost 3d performance too much but it should work pretty solid.
If you need the performance you install the latest fglrx and try to locate what gives you the problems. First thing is to use a non hw-accelerated DE. If it works fine you could try glxgears and something more demanding if it also works fine. If you're sure that 3d works fine there might be a problem in the compositor or in the driver which is triggered by the compositor. Then it's time to search the bug tracker for the compositor and report the problem.
As I am new to linux, as stated in other posts, I have no idea what you are talking about.
I want to run linux with full hardware acceleration, with the same, or better speeds than in windows.
Zoltan, if you could give me information, or guide me through getting my 7950 to work well with any distro, I'm up for installing anything but Gentoo.
And Wikidwig, if you tell someone to troubleshoot and to stop whining, maybe the answer you give should be understandable by someone who has stated before that they are new to linux.
I'm assuming that you are trying to get better or at least the same performance in games in linux as you do in windows. Linux is not ready for gaming, despite what many people want you to believe. I don't know the solution to this but the problem is people think, "I'll move to linux when devs release games for it natively." Devs think, "We will release games for linux when people start using them."
I'm not reffering to gaming at all, actually. Even moving windows around on the screen is laggy and slow. And without hardware acceleration, my browsers are slow, too.
Sorry, I assumed you know some of the stuff.
For radeon hd 7xxx upwards the open source driver in mesa is the radeonsi driver which is mostly new and thus lacking features and performance. A hd 6xxx would have given you a way better experience.
Distributions normally package the mesa driver because it's open source and you don't have to care about copyright and stuff.
The radeonsi driver got a lot better in the last few month so an kernel update and a new mesa version brings you a solid experience. The performance and OpenGL version are pretty bad, still.
But you apparently want full performance. That means you have to use fglrx (which is the same thing you'd use on windows). If the performance is bad with fglrx you might not have installed it properly. If there are render artifacts and flickering you should download and install the latest fglrx driver from amd directly. The instructions are clear and you can't do anything wrong, really. If there are still problems it's going to be hairy.
hurr durr
I did install them via AMD, used the package manager, and then the terminal commands after the manager failed.
Should I just wait a month or so for better support to come out for it?
Wow, this thread reminds me off:
http://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/fnvav/amazon_user_review_for_the_nikon_f6/
There will always be an operating system suitable for everyone, just like there is a camera suitable for everyone, and for some, the Nikon F6 is not the right camera, just like for some, GNU/Linux is not the right operating system.
I really want to use it though.