I'm kinda disappointed with AMD for making such shitty, malfunctioning drivers.

What is the best I can have for "ATi Mobilty Radeon HD 6650M" or "AMD Radeon HD 6650M" as it's also called?

That's almost an impossible question to answer. Each user has their own person experiences. Generally speaking, calling drivers "shitty" and then asking people who use said drivers for advice is not a good idea. I don't consider their drivers shitty, and I actually debated whether or not to even respond to your post.

The first thing that I have to wonder is if this is one of those hybrid laptops? Is there also an onboard intel GPU in your machine?

Adam

The open source drivers are better IMO unless you want to play some fairly demanding 3D games in Linux, or play some HD video content using vaapi. I use the open source drivers on my Zacate netbook which is not as fast as yours and it will still do 720p with the open source drivers.

The Catalyst drivers can be great, but it depends on your hardware. I got it working great, but I couldn't use suspend to ram with it.

Best thing you can do is maybe research it. Every experience can be different depending on the driver version, the kernel version, and the distro. I prefer the open source driver because I don't usually have to mess with anything. (Works out of the box)

Well, they work good for my HD3200 (integrated graphics) and my HD6870, no problems at all.

The correct name is the second one, all chips from the 6000 series and higher are called AMD, not ATI.
To your question, the only "fully functioning" driver for that card, in the sense of supporting all its hardware functions, is in fact the AMD driver (current version is 12.1). But this driver can have issues with dual graphics setups, in that case the open source radeon driver would be a better choice, despite the lack of support for all functions.

May be it would be the best to open a thread describing your problem exactly (don't forget your exact hardware setup) to get better help.

I have an AMD COU and an ATi GPU. I tried the official linux drivers from AMD and they caused GNOME3 to crash at every boot and jump into fallback mode.

You havent given us anywhere near enough information.

What distro? (I would guess from your other thread, Fedora 16) How did you install them? What driver version?

Doesnt switchable graphics, even AMD/AMD switchable graphics, cause problems with fglrx? I cant recal now, easier just you ask you adamk75....you seem to know your way around the closed AMD/ATI drivers from your posts here.

Switchable graphics, where there's no option in the BIOS to disable the onboard GPU, a real PITA. It is completely unsupported in the open source drivers. The closed drivers... Well the release notes make mention of supporting it, but I've only heard from one person who apparently (according to the log file they showed me) got it working. I've heard from lots of others who never got the proprietary drivers working on such a setup, so it definitely seems to be hit or miss (with miss being much more common).

Having said all that, I don't believe we have yet established that this is a laptop with hybrid graphics..

Adam

No, we dont know if its a laptop with switchable graphics.

To be honest, I should have included 'what model laptop is it' in my eariler post, but people who just do a 'these drivers suck' style post tend to not give the full laptop model even when asked. They mostly just put the base model number, not the full model number, eg- Acer Aspire 5552 instead of Acer Aspire 5552-N834G50Mnks. Without the 'N834G50Mnks' you could be looking at various different setups.

radeon

Sorry for being rude. I tend to enrage easily when things don't work my way. That'll change, though. Check out my other thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...a-16-a-930462/

All I know about its make and model is Acer Aspire 5552G. I have forgotten the rest of the product number. Any way I can find that out?

Maybe the sale receipt? If you dont have a receipt, or the receipt doesnt have the full model number, its possible that the full model number is marked on the system somehwere. Try looking on one the stickers under the laptop

If both of those luck out, I dont know how you would find it out.

But it doesnt matter a huge amount right now, the lspci output you included should give us somewhere to start.

BTW, the Acer Aspire 5552G model I picked at random..I hadnt seen your other thread. Just dumb luck that I actually got the base model correct.

*edit- I wouldnt worry that much about rudeness. Not that yuo were that rude, just fustrated. I also wouldnt worry to much about my 'people who just do a 'these drivers suck' style post tend to not give the full laptop model even when asked' comment. Thats just something I have noticed from here and there...and at least you posted your lspci. A lot of the 'these drivers suck' threads are people just venting, but often they arent that interested in answering questions from people who are trying to help them.

haha, okay

Well, I'll happily provide anything that can help you guys help me and of course, have some future reference

Since I got my Internet working now at my friend's place, I won't install Windows ever again on this machine. I also resized some heavily overkill partitions as per a few peoples' "request"

Google says your laptop does not have switchable graphics, and that your GPU is an ATI Radeon 5650, not 6650.

What distro are you using? If you're using*ubuntu, install the fglrx drivers. You can always switch back if they don't work for you.

Well, that's because the Acer Aspire 5552G comes in three or four different versions.

My version is the one with AMD Radeon HD 6650M and an AMD Athlon X2 P360 CPU.