How to install latest Opensource Radeon Driver?

Question

I am newbie to Ubuntu.

I want update my opensource Radeon driver to latest one, because comparatively to proprietary driver, opensource one is lagging behind according to benchmarks at here. Although It is so, I like to stay with opensource driver, But I want keep it up-to date to get better video driver performance.

So where can I find the latest opensource driver and how to install it?

I would recommend editing your question down to one primary question, and open a second question separately. — gravity, Jun 01 '16 at 15:45

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:32

Most of the open source Radeon driver is part of the Linux kernel, so you need to update that in order to get the latest version. On Ubuntu, you can use the the update manager to do so, although the Ubuntu repositories will not always have the latest version, so you will need to add an additional repository. If you want the very latest version, you'll need to download the tarball from kernel.org and compiling it yourself. (Not adviseable for newbies IMO !)

You should also update the xserver-xorg-video-ati and xserver-xorg-video-radeon packages, and possibly others.

Beware that:

Doing this can make your system unstable, since such kernel and other updates are not supported, and compiling your own kernel even more so.
Depending on your hardware and / or Ubuntu version, may not give you much, if any, performance improvents, since the drivers are already pretty optimized.

how to update xserver-xorg-video-ati and xserver-xorg-video-radeon? any terminal commands? I already have kernel version 4.4 — user15, Jun 02 '16 at 13:31
@user15 Something like apt-get install --only-upgrade xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-ati, and it should also be possible using the graphical software updater — Jonas Czech, Jun 02 '16 at 13:34

How to install latest Opensource Radeon Driver?

1 Answers1