ATI open source driver power management + solve Compiz flickering

Hi!

I think a lot of people are using ATI (sorry, AMD) cards in their PC, notebook, this post is for those users.

There are two drivers for ATI cards in Linux. The first is the open source driver provided by xorg, the second is the closed source fglrx driver. The system contains and uses the open source driver by default, it's OK for the most users (especially for the beginners). It can handle Compiz Fusion and has a good performance for the basic graphical operations. I use this driver on my Pinguy OS.

The advanced users can download the closed source drivers from AMD's website as a .run file, but you need additional packages e.g build-essential (development tools) and the kernel-headers package. If all of the dependencies are present, the .run file compiles the fglrx module and installs it to its place.

 

I read and article in the X.org wiki, which said that there are power profiles which we can use to control the VGA's performance and power consumption. My card's fan was very loud so I decided to try all the profiles and choose which is appropriate for me.

 

I installed Fedora before (but I formatted and installed other systems for educational purposes) and the Compiz-flickering problem occured. This means that when I rotated the cube or moved a window the screen was flickering which was very annoying. I didn't install the fglrx driver, so the open source one was in use. I couldn't solve it, but when I read the wiki article and varied between the power profiles (on Pinguy OS of course) I could reproduce the flickering problem. So the problem was: my card was in the "low" power profile. I went back to "high", the problem was solved.

 

I wrote a script that you can use to change the driver from a user-friendly interface. You can download it here.

So, if you have the compiz flickering problem, or just want to use power profiles, I can suggest my script. There is a description in it (copied from X.org wiki and translated to hungarian) so if you hesitate, you will get answer to your questions from my script. 

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