Although I have been using opensuse for many years I am completely new to ati graphics (I have always had nvidia cards and installed the driver using the ‘hardway’ {which isn’t}).
My new p/c has built-in ati graphics (AMD A10-5700 APU with Radeon™ HD Graphics). I saw a post referring to an ati driver at:
Which seems to be a beta driver. I installed the rpm and everything seems fine.
My questions are:
1 - Is this all I need to do?
2 - should I have installed a non-beta driver instead?
3 - looking at system settings / desktop effects / advanced - it shows composting type "opengl 2’ (should I change this to opengl 3.1 or leave it?) and for qt graphics system it shows 'raster (should I change this to native or leave it)
2 - should I have installed a non-beta driver instead?
No, there is none yet that works with openSUSE 13.1/Kernel 3.11.
3 - looking at system settings / desktop effects / advanced - it shows composting type "opengl 2’ (should I change this to opengl 3.1 or leave it?) and for qt graphics system it shows 'raster (should I change this to native or leave it)
Qt graphics system should be “raster” if using OpenGL.
The best compositing type would depend on your graphic card/driver combination. Since you installed the fglrx driver, you could try to switch that to OpenGL 3.1, the driver and card should support it. I have no idea if you would experience any difference though…
If you experience problems/slowdowns you should better switch back to OpenGL 2 of course. If it is not supported by the driver/card, KWin would even switch back automatically:
Speaking on performance improvements: Fredrik reworked our OpenGL 2 compositor code base and also introduced a new OpenGL 3.1 code path. By default we still use OpenGL 2 with the fallback to OpenGL 1, but one can easily switch. If the hardware doesn’t support OpenGL 3.1 it automatically falls back to OpenGL 2 or OpenGL 1.
(taken from What we did in KWin 4.11 | Martin’s Blog )