Performance of Gnome Shell + old AMD hardware?

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#1

Hi!!

I want to try OpenSUSE with Gnome, Leap or Tumbleweed, but before installing I’ve some doubts. I’m specially interested in the performance and smoothness of Gnome Shell with old AMD hardware, AMD Phenom II N620 and ATI Radeon HD4250, 4 GB RAM and a Samsung SSD.

I have tried it with several versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, also Antergos, but always had a poor experience with the desktop effects opening Activities, laggy and choppy animations, especially with three or more open apps.

Any help or experience will be really appreciated, thank you very much and best regards!! :slight_smile:

#2

Hi and welcome to the forum :slight_smile:
The radeon driver isn’t too bad with older gpu’s. Best to grab a live cd of Tumbleweed and try it out, if that goes well, Leap should be good…

Further info here;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Mobility_Radeon_HD_4xxx_Series
https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/

If it gets hot, there is a setting to low power that can be set, maybe some further tweaks for an xorg conf file.

#3

Hi!!
Thanks for the welcome!! You are right, I’ll try the live cd, thanks for the tip.

Best regards!! :grinning: