Linux

So, the long story first? My motherboard died, but I had a replica on a 2nd machine with a lower quality apu (dual core vs my quad core). I also went ahead and bought a RX460 4GB, thinking for the future since my APU is no longer supported in 16.04 LTS and ahead.

So, I grabbed the other motherboard, fit the RAM I had working, the APU on it and installed 17.04 on a SSD and then 14.04.5 LTS on another SSD. I use the mate desktop, because it uses the old way of showing the applications, which I liked much in Gnome2, and mate is also nice as it uses less ram. On 17.04 I noticed it didnt had the CPU scaling icon I used to have on my 'taskbar' so I could know the speed the cores are working and raise the performance levels (or downgrade whenever I wanted).

The ingame performance in 17.04 was surprisingly not surprising, keeping in mind that my A8-5600K graphics are like 2 generations (or more) below the RX460. EVE saw the GPU as an HD 2900 XT, and at interval inmediate... in station it would hit 120fps on ocassions in high details, but in space, it would be stuttering and then to max out at around 40-50fps.

Before installing the mate desktop, the details app showed I had a gallium 0.4 (the apu) with the polaris11 and LLVM 4.0.

Ok, so, then today I used my other SSD (exactly the same model/size) and installed 14.04.5 LTS, hoping to be able to use the cpu scaling options for the mate panels, and they were available even though they didnt work as they did in my other mate installations (now it asks for your admin password to execute them)( like from ondemand to performance). But it works.

On the GPU side, I have to say that I felt confused, I kept reading guides here and there but aside of mesa-utils I dont think I installed anything different. The additional drivers doenst show I need anything special at all, which I would think it should show that Im using which drivers at least, as it used to do. I got wine working, the eve installer and when I tried running it the first time... it would go very slow, and I can see that the 4 cores were at 100%, and that tells me that its not really using the new GPU yet.

Following different guides I was able to see that indeed the system sees my RX460 properly. The xorg thing shows that the amdgpu package is installed (has the cherkmark) but I think that Im missing something. The glxgears shows the gears animation and goes flawless.

I guess the part that Im missing to see is where do I enable it, as everytime I try to run eve.... cpu's go to 100% on all 4.

I love windows, but this is just the one thing that I dislike, not having a standard way to do things so that it works. I'm not switching to windows, thats for sure. Thankfully though, I know theres always someone ready to help :) and I'll wait patiently for that.

Update: I ended up installing 16.04 LTS and it started working.

I keep reading and reading....

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver



Which is my case, 14.04.5 with kernet 4.4. I, of course,didnt install the catalysts drivers, and upon checking the xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu package is installed, there I should understand that.... the amdgpu driver is installed (but not working somehow).

Following below... Testing the driver:

dmesg | egrep 'drm|radeon'

and executing this on terminal shows nothing, its just waiting for next terminal command.

The mesa-utils command is already installed and newest version.

Next one is:

LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo

And this list something I honestly dont understand.... but on the far right repeats "slow / none"

I read somewhere that I could check on the xorg.log to see if the driver is loaded or whatever, but the file is long and confusing :)

At some point in the xorg.log says:

[     4.656] (II) UnloadModule: "radeon"
[     4.656] (II) Unloading radeon
[     4.656] (II) UnloadModule: "vesa"
[     4.656] (II) Unloading vesa
[     4.656] (==) Depth 24 pixmap format is 32 bpp
[     4.656] (II) FBDEV(0): FBIOBLANK: Invalid argument (Screen blanking not supported by kernel - disabling)
[     4.659] (==) FBDEV(0): Backing store enabled
[     4.660] (==) FBDEV(0): DPMS enabled
[     4.660] (==) RandR enabled
[     4.665] (II) AIGLX: Screen 0 is not DRI2 capable
[     4.665] (EE) AIGLX: reverting to software rendering
[     4.770] (II) AIGLX: enabled GLX_MESA_copy_sub_buffer
[     4.770] (II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized swrast
[     4.770] (II) GLX: Initialized DRISWRAST GL provider for screen 0

Software rendering I totally understand, which accounts for EVE running my 4 cores at 100%.

I should be able to run the RX460 with my current specs and version, but for some reason it doesnt.

So unless you guys have any other ideas, the only way to make this work is upgrade to 16.04 (ugh) and if it still doenst work well... then try the AMDGPU-PRO?

Thanks for the reply.

I actually went and decided to go install 16.04 LTS and after doing 3 separate installs in different hard drives / SSD's, I got this one to work and I forgot to reply here about it.

I find confusing that the AMD GPU's arent listed on the additional drivers section as it used to, which made knowing if your GPU is set easier, but after 16.04 installed I could see that the AMDGPU driver was loading correctly and then after doing the wine stuff, I got EVE working again with the GPU hardware.

I think I will clone this install into another SSD and try the MESA part, which is still a tad confusing part, but I will try it.

Im a tad burned at the moment with all the install tries I did that weekend, so it will be something for a few weeks ahead to do.

I havent yet updated my eve firefox bookmarks and TS and other important eve stuff (mumble ugh), and completely forgot about this thread too.

Thanks :)

I checked the other day my kernet and I am at 4.8.0.54.generic.

I remember you told me that it was best to have LLVM at 4 something. On this install its at 3.8.0.

I found a step by step guide on how to do the nine thing on 16.04, so I'll be testing that this weekend on my other SSD.