Have a FirePro M6100 and there don't seem to be any drivers for it

English Hardware
1

I have a Dell M6800 with a FirePro M6100 graphics card and the Radeon driver doesn’t seem to be working with it. At least not for games. The games do run, but extremely slowly - I think they’re using the integrated graphics. Here’s my lspci output:

> sudo lspci -vnnn | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0416] (rev 06) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Saturn XT [FirePro M6100] [1002:6640] (rev ff) (prog-if ff)

This seems to indicate that the integrated chip is the active one, but that’s on the desktop. I’m not certain that this applies to games as well. glxgears runs, but it averages around 60 FPS. That seems low, but maybe it’s vsynced or something.

So I’ve tried to install proprietary drivers, but the fglrx driver that I get from AMD, which is specifically for my machine, says:

“Detected X Server version ‘XServer 1.19.6_64a’ is not supported. Supported versions are X.Org 6.9 or later, up to XServer 1.10 (default:v2:x86_64:lib:XServer 1.19.6_64a:none:4.12.14-lp150.12.16-default:)
Installation will not proceed.”

I also tried the AMDGPU-PRO driver, following the instructions here: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:AMDGPU-PRO, but it also complained that XServer was too new. So I told YAST to ignore the error and install anyway, and when I booted I got a black screen and I had to restore from a snapshot.

Now… I guess I could downgrade XServer, but I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. I’m wondering if there’s some way to force the Radeon driver to work with games, or at least a way to tell whether or not it’s working with games.

Anyone have any ideas?

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Ok, so you have hybrid graphics. The AMD graphics chipset (1002:6640) is supported by the open-source amdgpu driver, as well as the open-source radeon driver. AFAIU, blacklisting the radeon driver should allow the other driver to load.

It should be possible to switch video cards using PRIME…

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PRIME#Open-source_drivers

Hopefully, others more familiar with AMD/Intel graphics can comment further here.

Now… I guess I could downgrade XServer, but I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.

You’d be right - it’s not a good idea. We can discard that idea swiftly. :wink:

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Just to follow up: I couldn’t get PRIME to work, so I ended up fixing this by disabling hybrid graphics in the UEFI. This forced everything through the discreet card, then I blacklisted the radeon driver to get the AMDGPU driver to work. And it does work, everything’s working now, though it’s not as power efficient as hybrid. It does say in the UEFI that only Ubuntu is supported for hybrid… oh well. That’s okay.

I also installed glmark2 and ran some benchmarks, just to reassure myself that this was an improvement:

Intel: 2181
Radeon: 5297
AMDGPU: 6083

And my games are nice and smooth. So that’s everything, thanks for the help.

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Glad to read that you have got your AMD graphics working with the amdgpu driver. Well done. :slight_smile:

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One way to know which kernel driver and which X driver(s) is

inxi -Gxx
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Hey, that’s pretty useful. Thanks.