I originally posted this to /r/linuxquestions on reddit a couple of days ago, but had no response. I was wondering if any of the Linux gurus here had any idea
Hello All,
On my Ubuntu 14.04.2 Gnome LTS system which I've been upgrading the hardware for over the last year or so, I recently bought a new graphics card around the £300 range, the best bang for the buck being the R9 390.
For those who don't know, the 390 was a supposed rebrand of the 290 with boosted specs, but based off the same core architecture. In my mind, this isn't a rebrand, this is an overhyped refresh, but it out ran the GTX 970 in benchmarks and in real world performance, so I grabbed it.On to the point of this post: I noticed that I wasn't getting the amazing graphical performance I wanted under Linux like I was in Windows. I'm pretty experienced with the basics of Linux, so I did
lspci | grep vga -ito make sure my card was working and I noticed that it showed up as an R9 290 and not an R9 390. I was wondering if the poor performance is somehow related to the current AMD drivers (I'm using fglrx-updates) not registering my card correctly since I doubt they've been updated to correctly support the new cards, or if games rendered using OpenGL rely a lot more on the CPU than DirectX does, since my CPU is currently bottlenecking my system on higher end DirectX games. I guess that's a con of upgrading an 8 year old PC part by part.Full specs of my current monstrosity:
- Some shitty ECS motherboard
- MCP61 Chipset
- 3Gb of mix and match DDR2
- AMD Athlon II x4 AMD/Gigabyte R9 390