Hi all!,

I bought a Sapphire Radeon HD3870 X2 this past week, you know, the one with two CPUs, that, I believe, uses some kind of integrated CrossFire. I have just installed the new Ubuntu 8.04. I was hoping to see the usual option to install proprietary drivers that comes as a system tool in the last Ubuntu versions, but no card appears in there.

I have downloaded the last Catalyst drivers (8.4) for 64bit machines, those which finally have support for the 3xxx series, but, when I run them, the installation doesn't seem to do anything. It starts and goes through the whole process, but no reboot prompt appears.

Some problems I have are that I cannot watch full screen videos without pixelation or with a very slow frame rate. In MPlayer, I cannot use Xv mode. When I go to console mode (Ctrl+Alt+F1-F6), there is no prompt and, when I go back to Desktop mode, a warning appears, in red letters over black background, console mode style, telling me that my graphics card has no power or something like that. I use a mole adapter to feed my power-hungry card, but it seems to work perfectly.

Any clues? Should I just wait until Ati develops some working graphics drivers? Do I have to tweak something to make the CrossFire works?

Thanks!

A reboot isn't necessary to install graphic drivers as long as you drop to console, stop X, install the module, update xorg.conf and restart X.

It could be you need to wait for better drivers. ATi's Linux driver is typically 1 month behind their Windows driver when it comes to development. My previous experience with them has me switching between the binary blob and the open source driver. You might want to try the open source ATi driver. Sorry that I forget what its called; I normally recommend nVidia.