Hi all
First I’m not sure where I should post this, as I’m not sure if it’s a gaming or graphics problem, so please forgive me if I’ve got it wrong.
I have been running Ubuntu and have a large collection of games bought from Humble Bundle. Generally they run without issue (apart from needing 32-bit libraries, the finding of which has become more difficult with Ubuntu 13.10 than it used to be - it used to just need an ia32-libs package which is now deprecated) but I am increasingly not liking the decisions of Canonical (ie. Amazon ads and routing user desktop searches over the web) and I am wanting to run a GNU/Linux which is more community driven. openSUSE seems to work better for me than other distros I’ve tried (I used to use SUSE years ago), and is a recommended OS by prism-break.org.
My issue is, once I have the OS and GNOME up and running well, I start to install my games collection but the performance is totally unacceptable or I get incomplete graphics. I have tried searching and reading through forums, the openSUSE website etc. I’ve spent almost two weeks reading and searching until I’ve reached overload. Most games also need S3TC, I’ve done things like force_s3tc_enable=true which makes graphics appear better but the speed is still unusable. I’ve tried libtxc-dxtn which seems to fix the graphics but still is too slow to be usable.
The only way to make the games work at a usable speed seems to be to install fglrx, but that then breaks my GNOME setup and random icons and graphics vanish!! I use the standard open source driver that comes with Ubuntu and the games work perfectly, but on openSUSE the standard drivers just don’t seem up to the job. So what is so different between the two distros when neither is using a proprietary AMD driver? Why do games which work flawlessly on one, not work on another? What is it I’m just not getting? How can I get these games to work properly without getting a headache in the process?
I’m sure it’s something blindingly obvious, but I’ve fatigued myself trying to figure it out and would appreciate any help or pointers someone can give. I’ve had to go back to Ubuntu for now because I broke my openSUSE install trying to remove the fglrx drivers after it messed up my GNOME desktop.
My hardware is a HP Pavilion g6 laptop with AMD A8-3500M APU with Radeon HD 6620G, if it’s of any help Ubuntu describes the graphics as Gallium 0.4 on AMD SUMO.