New to Linux and trying to install graphics drivers

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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Hi, I am new to Linux, and I am currently using Ubuntu. I have steam installed, and once trying to play a game, it looked all screwed up, although that doesn’t really surprise me. I am not sure if I should install an open source graphics driver or the proprietary drivers, and I am not sure how to go about installing either of them.

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it looked all screwed up, although that doesn't really surprise

Why, may I ask, would that not surprise you?

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I just kind of was expecting something to mess up, since I haven’t installed any drivers yet. Also, I didn't think that I could possibly be as easy just installing steam and the game.

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tek solve my problem I won't tell you what graphics card i have so you know what to tell me mhm

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It's an R9 290X

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Hey, I'm not trying to be jumping down your throat, but you should be a little more careful with what you say. People will really take that as the wrong attitude.

So, you're saying you're not surprised since you don't know what you're doing? Well, first off, I'm gonna venture to say that you do have some form of driver installed, just cause you haven't done it yourself doesn't mean that the kernel hasn't loaded one for you. You should run

lspci -k |grep -A 3 VGA

lspci will show you information about your physical system, and grep will output only the information having to do with you graphics card. Look at that, and if it says radeon, then you're running the open source drivers. This is the most likely case. If you think that drivers are to blame here for your poor performance, then you can install the proprietary drivers. I'm not really sure how to do it since I have an nvidia card, but if you google the procedure, I'll help you get through it.

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Same as him I have nvidia
I know nothing of amd
if you had nvidia I have a ppa for that

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Do you really have to use a different ppa for the nvidia upstream?

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Don't have to but it makes it easy to install a particualar driver it lists 355 different than 347

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Thanks. It returned this.

03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Hawaii XT [Radeon R9 290X]
Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] Device 3080
Kernel driver in use: fglrx_pci
03:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device aac8
andrew@andrew-desktop:~$

I guess that fglrx_pci must be the current drivers installed that came with Ubuntu.

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Those would be the proprietary. I think the process of switching to radeon is much simpler than it would be going to fglrx. Look it up, try it, and if you run into problems, ask someone here, they'll help you.

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Is 347 really the latest that debian/ubuntu ships? That's crazy, I've been on rolling-releases too long, lol.

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This is the ppa i use which goes to 355 I'm using 346
https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa