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According to this website the Radeon R7 graphics card I just installed should be considerably faster overall than the GeForce GTS 250. However, when testing the card on Ubuntu playing Minecraft, it performs much slower, getting only 30% fps of the old card.

There are no drivers supplied for either Windows Vista or Linux by the manufacturer, so I used the "Additional Drivers" tool of Ubuntu to find some proprietary drivers for it.

Are there any tests I can run to help me figure out this issue, or provide anyone with more info? The "glmark2" program gets only ~250 fps, sometimes ~600 fps.

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  • The problem is your missing the optimized drivers for the card. Unless you move to supported operating system for the drivers there isn't a great deal that can be done.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Feb 1, 2014 at 20:07
  • Are you actually using fglrx (AMD's proprietary drivers)? It sounds like you're using the reference software implementation of Mesa. glxinfo will point this out immediately.
    – Andon M. Coleman
    Commented Feb 1, 2014 at 20:16
  • @AndonM.Coleman Software rendering wouldn't deliver anywhere near 30% the performance of a hardware-accelerated driver. If he were using software rendering, he'd get about 0.2 FPS in Minecraft, not 20-30. Mesa isn't a software-only renderer, either; far from it: reasonably featureful drivers supporting OpenGL 3.1 are available for Intel, AMD, and Nvidia cards. But his card is so new that Mesa probably doesn't support it at all, or poorly, and hitting "Additional Drivers" probably gave him a version of Catalyst (albeit likely not the latest, which could be the actual problem).
    – allquixotic
    Commented Feb 1, 2014 at 20:19
  • Without further information (such as his Ubuntu version and the output of glxinfo) it's impossible to know more, but I am entirely convinced that he is not using software rendering if he's getting more than 1 fps.
    – allquixotic
    Commented Feb 1, 2014 at 20:20
  • Actually, it can and does particularly for an application as undemanding as Minecraft. Believe it or not, using Apple's software rasterizer you can do per-fragment lighting in real-time at moderate resolutions (e.g. 1024x768) on a modern CPU. Mesa is nowhere near as optimized, but it can still deliver the sort of framerates discussed for simple applications like Minecraft. Minecraft is primarily vertex bound, and software rendering can easily handle that; not nearly as fast as hardware, but still >> 1 FPS.
    – Andon M. Coleman
    Commented Feb 1, 2014 at 20:23

1 Answer 1

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  • Benchmarks and hardware clock comparisons are not necessarily indicative of actual performance, because driver performance is such a major factor in determining actual observed performance.
  • On Ubuntu (which version? you didn't say) you probably don't have anywhere near the latest Catalyst driver by clicking the "Additional Drivers" tool, especially if you aren't running the latest release of Ubuntu (13.10) or the alpha (14.04). The latest Catalyst is 13.12, and there's even been a recent beta release. You can (and should) try to install the latest Catalyst manually if you don't have the latest already. You can find the version of Catalyst in the Catalyst Control Center, or by running glxinfo and comparing the OpenGL version string against the version advertised by Catalyst 13.12, which is 13.251.
  • Catalyst on Linux performance has always been spotty, with some applications running great, and others, not so much. You won't have any more luck with the open source graphics drivers, especially since your card isn't 2+ years old yet (the open source drivers don't start to get reasonably OK until about 2 years after the card hits the market). The nvidia drivers on Linux are better optimized than Catalyst.

If you wanted to get the most performance out of your card, you'd use Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1. I can totally understand wanting to use an alternative OS, but if you have already tried updating to the latest Catalyst and you still have poor performance, you should blame AMD for not investing enough resources into their Linux driver.

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