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Just upgraded my graphics card from a HD6970 to a HD7990. Have tried Ubuntu 13.10, the last LTS and also Kubuntu 13.10 but none will run a display properly. Even when booting from a live USB/DVD I get a corrupted display. Clean installs do not help.

In particular, Ubuntu displays strange behaviour. The launch bar, the dash, and the shutdown options (accessed when pressing the computers power button) all display properly, but everything else is a mash of crazy colours.

Screenshot:

enter image description here

Any info gratefully appreciated. Hopefully it is hardware that will be supported soon.

Zanna
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user218887
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  • Are you using the proprietary AMD drivers? – Dillmo Nov 24 '13 at 13:33
  • It is not possible to change the drivers. Upon opening the software centre to select the proprietry driver, I get a window filled with the currupted display. It is not possible to navigate the interface. The desktop and any application that is opened is just filled with currupted display, as per above. Even the terminal doesn't play ball. – user218887 Nov 24 '13 at 14:09
  • Do you still have your old card? You could switch back to that, change the drivers, then switch to the new one. – Dillmo Nov 24 '13 at 16:28
  • That could work! However I would be in a pickle everytime that I wanted to do a clean install... might give it a go when I can spare the downtime. – user218887 Nov 24 '13 at 16:31
  • Had the time today to put the old card back, and switch over to proprietary drivers. Then swapped the cards. All was fine.

    Think it's just a matter of the Ubuntu devs taking a look at the standard drivers. Surprised this hasn't came up before though.

     – user218887 Jan 05 '14 at 11:17

2 Answers2

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Have found out that the display that I was confronted with is typical of any situation where trying to use cross-fire'd AMD cards.

It is necessary to download the propriety drivers from AMD whilst you don't have the crossfire setup, or if you do have the crossfire setup in place, you'll have to drop to tty and wget the drivers.

Even once you start the installation procedure from tty following the graphical interface failing to load, following the recommended steps will not work. Instead of installing via the recommended route (generating a system specific installation package) choose the option for xorg install.

Also, having a different AMD card in place and installing the drivers, then switching to your crossfire setup (swapping the cards) doesn't work either - you'll have to drop to tty, clean out the drivers, reinstall xorg, reboot, and then install proprietary drivers afresh!

user218887
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If you like to work with commandlines you could switch to an other tty with

ctrl+alt+F1

then follow the steps on this answer:
AMD Driver update (one from amd.com)

It describes fresh installation of graphic drivers from AMD.

Your card should be supported.

To switch back to graphical terminal use:

ctrl+alt+F7

Latest AMD drivers can be found here
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download

Community
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Evenbit GmbH
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  • Could work for someone who still has a their Ubuntu installation in place, and has a dual boot going on so that they can download the driver in Windows and put on a USB to access it once back in Ubuntu. – user218887 Nov 24 '13 at 18:54
  • Well. You could also download via commandline with wget. – Evenbit GmbH Nov 25 '13 at 07:37