ATI Radeon HD 4850 - OpenSuse 12.1 - terribly slow

English Hardware
#1

I am trying to use OpenSuse for the first time as a desktop OS instead of just a server OS. Consequently I have come to learn that getting hardware to work properly in OpenSuse can be a b****. Specifically I am currently trying to get my “Sapphire” ATI Radeon 4850 512MB GDDR3 PCI-E graphics card to work properly both in KDE and GNOME (although I will settle for only getting one of these to work). Currently I have installed the AMD Catalyst driver and gotten OpenSuse to work with the card and output to my monitor. The problem is it is terribly slow and GNOME 3 falls back into FAILSAFE mode. Watching video on a 1680x1050 monitor @ 60Hz is rather slow. Furthermore when moving windows around the desktop, the response time is very slow and often results in the window being blurred from the move start point to the move end point temporarily.

Let me know if you need any more info.

Thanks in advance,
~Daniel

#2

What about installing the proprietary driver?
See here: http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/hardware/473362-ati-driver-install-problem-suse-12-1-amd-cpu-64bit.html#post2447932

Sorry, you have it already. That Gnome starts in fallback mode is not normal. Are you sure is it used then?

#3

I am not sure. It probably isn’t being used if it is this slow, but I really don’t know how to check. Any help would be appreciated.

#4

Run the different tests described in this post: http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/hardware/473362-ati-driver-install-problem-suse-12-1-amd-cpu-64bit-2.html#post2448005

How did you install the ATI driver? Could you post the output of the following commands:


rpm -qa | grep fglrx
lsmod | grep fglrx
hwinfo --gfxcard