I was wondering what driver, TODAY would be best for one who's running a Radeon HD 7870 Ghz Edition on Arch Linux.
I've noticed that with xf86-video-ati I'm getting some crappy issues relating to multiple screens, as well as some tearing outside of video games. Yes, that's right folks, on the desktop, I'm experiencing tearing.
Performance wise the proprietary drivers are probably going to be better and they also give you the option to enable tearless desktop though you may need to re-enable this on every reboot even though CCC says it's enabled however I neither confirm nor deny that this is still the case as I don't experience any tearing. Though the catalyst drivers are a bit of a pain to install
Can I not simply install the drivers through yaourt?
Yes you can but it's but it requires a bit of configuration and you will have to rebuild the drivers with every kernel upgrade and you would still need to downgrade xorg. Just visit this wiki article: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMD_Catalyst
Is "multihead support" meaning more than one display or more than one display server at a time?
I think its just more than one display
Alright, yeah. My main problem with the official drivers was that they only allow the use of two monitors at a time (through everything but displayport) whereas the open source drivers (at least they used to) allowed the use of 3+ monitors.
But now I only use two monitors anyway so I'm fine.
Well how many monitors do you have?
Never mind I'm stupid I read that wrong
I used to use my TV as a media display, with my two monitors as working displays, but now I have a chromecast.