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According to this website the Radeon R7 graphics card I just installed should be considerably faster overall than the GeForce GTS 250. However, when testing the card on Ubuntu playing Minecraft, it performs much slower, getting only 30% fps of the old card.
There are no drivers supplied for either Windows Vista or Linux by the manufacturer, so I used the "Additional Drivers" tool of Ubuntu to find some proprietary drivers for it.
Are there any tests I can run to help me figure out this issue, or provide anyone with more info? The "glmark2" program gets only ~250 fps, sometimes ~600 fps.
The problem is your missing the optimized drivers for the card. Unless you move to supported operating system for the drivers there isn't a great deal that can be done. – Ramhound – 2014-02-01T20:07:28.153
Are you actually using
fglrx
(AMD's proprietary drivers)? It sounds like you're using the reference software implementation of Mesa.glxinfo
will point this out immediately. – Andon M. Coleman – 2014-02-01T20:16:06.413@AndonM.Coleman Software rendering wouldn't deliver anywhere near 30% the performance of a hardware-accelerated driver. If he were using software rendering, he'd get about 0.2 FPS in Minecraft, not 20-30. Mesa isn't a software-only renderer, either; far from it: reasonably featureful drivers supporting OpenGL 3.1 are available for Intel, AMD, and Nvidia cards. But his card is so new that Mesa probably doesn't support it at all, or poorly, and hitting "Additional Drivers" probably gave him a version of Catalyst (albeit likely not the latest, which could be the actual problem). – allquixotic – 2014-02-01T20:19:22.227
Without further information (such as his Ubuntu version and the output of
glxinfo
) it's impossible to know more, but I am entirely convinced that he is not using software rendering if he's getting more than 1 fps. – allquixotic – 2014-02-01T20:20:37.340Actually, it can and does particularly for an application as undemanding as Minecraft. Believe it or not, using Apple's software rasterizer you can do per-fragment lighting in real-time at moderate resolutions (e.g. 1024x768) on a modern CPU. Mesa is nowhere near as optimized, but it can still deliver the sort of framerates discussed for simple applications like Minecraft. Minecraft is primarily vertex bound, and software rendering can easily handle that; not nearly as fast as hardware, but still >> 1 FPS. – Andon M. Coleman – 2014-02-01T20:23:06.637
@AndonM.Coleman Well, it depends on what he's doing in Minecraft -- a very basic world with almost nothing going on might get OK performance on
llvmpipe
(which uses LLVM to optimize shaders to run efficiently on the CPU), and if he is actually usingllvmpipe
it's probably due to the Catalyst install he attempted, failing. On the other hand, given what people typically do in Minecraft, it can be enough to drop a GTX TITAN on Windows 8.1 down to below 60 fps, easily, sometimes into the teens. – allquixotic – 2014-02-01T20:26:30.580