I have been happily running ascii but upgraded from my Intel built-in graphics to an AMD FirePro W4100 because I do a lot of 4K video editing, but no game-playing, and thought this 50W card would save energy and work well with 4K. There is a nearly identical Nvidia card, but I decided to support AMD, for easier Linux support, which has not been my experience!
The card booted OK under ascii but was using the Radeon Xorg driver which gave flashing behavior from time to time, typical of a bad video driver. I decided to try beowulf to get some newer versions of stuff. I installed a generic ascii on my other partition, then did the upgrade, from an xterm, perhaps not the smartest idea but it worked. When I ran synaptic, it added and removed hundreds of packages! Not exactly efficient, but I was left with a working system. The only issue was that my Samsung M.2 SSD only boots as efi, and install systems don't seem to realize that, resulting in boot failure or boot install failure, but I used the rEFInd program to recover everything, and all seems good with both beowulf and ascii. The situation now is that I can't get the correct X video driver working, which should be the amdgpu one, under either ascii or beowulf. (Full screen 4K video plays great at 60 fps under mpv, with nothing dropped and no flashes.) I did try disabling pretty much all the acceleration options on the radeon driver, but that did not help with the flashing. Details: Motherboard ASRock Z97 Extreme6, i7-4790K, 16 GB, latest Bios 2.80 added non-free repository, and installed firmware. On boot, both radeon and amdgpu kernel modules are installed. When X starts, the radeon driver is used. The xorg.conf output by Xorg -configure calls for the amdgpu driver, but trying to run, get fatal error: amdgpu_device_initialize: DRM version is 2.50.0 but this kernel is only compatible with 3.x.x Under ascii, the radeon driver is called for by Xorg -configure, and the error when forcing amdgpu is almost the same, except ... DRM version is 2.49.0... It seems that there are some incompatibilities built into both ascii and beowulf when it comes to this card. I could compile a kernel (which I used to do all the time in the 90's, and probably haven't done for 10 years) if that would help with the DRM version issue. I tried the Ubuntu version of the proprietary driver from AMD, and it complained about the kernel version. I could compile a kernel to match the Ubuntu one, I suppose, and re-try the proprietary driver, if anyone thinks that would help. I'm not looking for the fastest performance in the world, though, just stability! Any advice? --Tim
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