Ubuntu
fglrx-installer package

  1. Bug #1058040
  2. Comment #81

Comment 81 for bug 1058040

Revision history for this message
madbiologist (me-again) wrote : Re: fglrx-installer not working with AMD Radeon/Mobility Radeon HD 2000-4000 cards in Quantal

I neglected to say that to use the new DPM power management for the AMD/ATI Radeon you will need to select it at boot by adding radeon.dpm=1 to your GRUB kernel boot options as described at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Troubleshooting#Editing_the_GRUB_2_Menu_During_Boot

If you have R700 or newer hardware (other than APUs) you will also need to install the latest AMD graphics microcode (ucode) files to /lib/firmware/radeon
These are available at http://people.freedesktop.org/~agd5f/radeon_ucode/
Get the version ending in "smc".

R700 basically means Radeon HD 4000 series and newer. However note that according to Wikipedia and http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index5h2 the Mobility Radeon HD 4225/4250 is a RV620 chip, so anyone with one of those shouldn't need the updated firmware files.

Unlike the older dynpm method, the new DPM method works with multiple monitors and there shouldn't be any flickering as the performance level changes are handled by dedicated hardware rather than the driver.

The currently under-development 3.13 upstream kernel enables DPM by default (without needing the radeon.dpm=1 boot parameter I mentioned above) for Radeon HD 4000 through Radeon HD 7000 series graphics processors but with some specific ASICs being excluded.