I am getting a laptop I bought off ebay tomorrow and it comes with an AMD Radeon HD 6470M discrete video card. This is not exactly a gaming powerhouse but that's not what I bought if for, however I do want to get the most out of it. I have never had an ATI/AMD on Slackware and was wondering what is the best driver to use, opensource, fglrx, or something else?

I have a similar generation AMD card in my PC. If you are not trying to do serious gaming but maybe play something from GOG in wine once in a while, and want desktop compositing etc; I think you will be happy with the OSS drivers.

I am getting good performance and there are basically no issues with KMS/suspend resume/etc anymore. Its possible the Catalyst drivers would push a few more frames and you might need them if you want to do something fancy with OpenCL but otherwise stick what's shipping in Slackware 14.(1|2) its easy and it works :-)

With that card, you'd likely have no choice but to use open source if you're intending on using 14.2. I doubt that card is supported with AMD's AMDGPU-Pro drivers, and the catalyst drivers won't work on Xorg 1.18.x.

But AMD drivers have improved immensely over the years. You'll likely be plenty happy with using the open source drivers (plus, things work out of the box).

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Pretty sure it uses the r600g driver. It's too old/incompatible for amdgpu. But that doesn't seem to be a big deal since it is likely fully capable for OpenGL 4.5. So it is a plenty decent chip.

Don't let anyone discourage you from the open source driver. It's a fantastic driver. I've never bothered with the so called official crap.

The biggest things to watch for since you are likely on a laptop is to determine if you have a hybrid-gpu system, and also read up on the power saving controls.

Yeah, I specifically stated that it would likely not be compatible with AMDGPU-Pro and then stated that he'd have to use the open source driver since Catalyst won't work in 14.2.

I then also didn't discourage him from using the open source drivers since they've improved a ton.

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I own a laptop with a similar Radeon HD 6490M discrete GPU.

This was the first implementation of AMD's muxless graphics. The display is always driven by the integrated GPU. The discrete GPU is used solely for rendering to memory. Its display outputs are not connected to anything.

At the time that I bought the laptop (2011), the open-source radeon driver had no understanding of rendering and display being done on different hardware. I disabled the discrete GPU and never again tried to make it work.
Ed