How do I know if I have the right video card drivers?

English Hardware
#1

I have an Acer Aspire V with an A8-5557M APU with a Radeon GPU.
Thing is, I just followed the default installation steps. Do I already somehow have the most up to date driver?

I’m not too sure how to proceed, but something tells me I don’t…

Any insight would be appreesh!

<3

Khan

#2

Hi
From the output of;


/sbin/lspci -nnk |grep -A3 VGA

Should show radeon, since that APU has the Richland GPU (Non GCN) and you have the latest kernel installed, then yes you will have the latest radeon driver.

#3

Yup, I think you’re right, that returns:

00:01.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Richland [Ra
deon HD 8550G] [1002:990d]
Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:080f]
Kernel driver in use: radeon
Kernel modules: radeon

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Mars [Radeon
HD 8670A/8670M/8750M] [1002:6600] (rev ff)
Kernel driver in use: radeon
Kernel modules: radeon
03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Qualcomm Atheros QCA8171 Gigabit Ethernet [1969:10a1] (re
v 13)

Thank you!

#4

Hi
So you have two GPU’s, is this a desktop system? I’m not sure, but think the Mars one may be able to run the amdgpu driver but not with Leap 42.2…

openSUSE Leap 42.2;


malcolml@ernie1:~> /sbin/modinfo amdgpu | grep 6600
malcolml@ernie1:~> /sbin/modinfo radeon | grep 6600
alias:          pci:v00001002d00006600sv*sd*bc*sc*i*

openSUSE Tumbleweed;


malcolml@ernie3:~> /sbin/modinfo amdgpu | grep 6600
alias:          pci:v00001002d00006600sv*sd*bc*sc*i*
malcolml@ernie3:~> /sbin/modinfo radeon | grep 6600
alias:          pci:v00001002d00006600sv*sd*bc*sc*i*

Can you disable the Richland GPU in the BIOS? Not sure but in the next release (42.3) you may be able to run the proprietary amdgpu-pro driver (That depends on AMD folks).

#5

Nah it’s just a laptop,

The Aspire V

Maybe it has a dual core GPU?

Embarassing though this is, I’m probably not as familiar with hardware as I ought to be!

Is there some benefit to disabling one GPU?

#6

And that’s why you should grep with the class code catch all or the long form (for the subclasses, and which has the added benefit of showing what you’re looking for); respectively:

/sbin/lspci -nnk | grep '\03' -A3

and

/sbin/lspci -nnk | grep 'VGA\|3D\|Display' -A3

or similarly (and depending upon how you feel that day :p):

/sbin/lspci -nnk | egrep 'VGA|3D|Display' -A3

Had it been an AMD & Intel hybrid laptop, a simple VGA grep would miss the Intel

Can you disable the Richland GPU in the BIOS?
I doubt the dgpu is connected to the panel, or if you could disable the igpu