Guys,

My i5 Haswell desktop has an integrated Intel HD4600 graphics which has been great with Slackware64 14.1 so far as well as Windows 7. And I just got hold of a used Asus ATI HD 5670 graphics card from a friend for couple of days, I didn't buy it yet.

I'm aware about the installation procedure, thanks for our continuously evolving and wonderful wiki :- This Link and I downloaded the relevant Linux binary from AMD site with the name amd-catalyst-14-4-rev2-linux-x86-x86-64-may6.

My question, however is, is there a way that I can make my desktop switch between my integrated and dedicated graphics cards or I have no choice except to connect my monitor to the dedicated one and stay happy with that?


Regards.

There is a way to switch off the ATI card but I don't know how; sorry.

If I had to guess it may be that you have to shut down or disable the driver to the card in which you do not want to use. (like I said guessing) Or just unplug the power to the graphics card and see if switches over to the onboard one. (idea)

These articles might help.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/hybrid_graphics

http://superuser.com/questions/45072...f-the-computer

http://superuser.com/questions/30248...phics-in-ubunt

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for replying. Those links are good especially the Archwiki but I'm not sure if that applies to Desktops as well. I mean laptops have this dynamic switching of graphics since some time because of power consumption issue but how on desktops.
If I connect the monitor cable to the dedicated GPU card, how will the dynamic switching happen from the OS side if the monitor(hardware) is directly not connected to the integrated one.
Guess I'll have to test this today or this weekend to see what actually I see in real.

Any other suggestions will be appreciated.

Regards.

The main issue I think you'll run into is mesa GL libraries. If you just use the linux open source driver for the ati, I'd expect no better performance than the intel onboard, so what's the point right? When you install the ati binary drivers, it is going to update libraries that the intel drivers will not then know how to use.

In short, I think you are in for more trouble than it's worth. If you want to try, I'd give a custom 3.15 kernel a shot at that intel card and see what kind of speed the newer drivers will give you.

Good point. Truth to be told even I'm not sure what usage I'd put of this card. I'm not a gamer but I occasionally play San Andreas, Vice City and Doom on the spare Windows installation(which is there for my gf's propriety software), I just make use of multiple VMs to learn writing device drivers in C and breaking the kernels in the process. I don't think the VMs will notice the change or do they?
And if the ATI drivers are going to modify the libraries, would it be a mess to revert to the original one?

How will I measure the speed or performance? I'm not aware.

Regards.

I use a opimus laptop, an asus N56, that is a generation behind your intel chip. Running vm's I don't even wake my nvidia card up as the intel one can handle that just fine. The performance difference between intel and an ati running the linux bundled drivers is likely to be small.

Best way to test that I can think of is loading a game and clicking 'show frame rate'. I usually check out framerate bumps when I update the bumblebee driver builds and / or the kernel by looking at framerates from doom3 and dota2, etc.

Finally, removing and replacing the open gl libraries, and possibly some mesa stuff. Not a huge deal, but sorta a pain. The ati proprietary will build a slackware package you can install, which will list all of it's files for the record in /var/log/packages/<some ati package name>. What you would need to do is note all the library files and grep for them in that folder to find what bits it touched, then when you remove the package, force reinstall all the packages that included a file overwritten by the ati driver.

If you google say "linux <insert card model here> benchmarks" it's likely you'll find a comparison of the card with intel's onboard one done by some at least knowledgeable folks that you can check out. My personal exp... ati + linux = poor performance and I'm better off with the intel chip / card.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for replying mate. Looks like I've got some reading to do.

Regards.

Your Welcome, always glad to help.

My monitor cable is directly plugged into my new ATI Radeon 7750 2 GB card and my graphics are exceptionally clearer and brighter than when my low life 3300 Radeon onboard was doing the performing.
As far as the switching goes the new Radeon 7750 completely over-rode the on-board graphics.

I have found a lot of the Arch WiKi's very helpful and and good resource to give you insight to other things as well.

Good luck--

Thanks bud. I got some time to test the Catalyst drivers on the Windows7 partition last night. Ran the Furmark 3D burn-in test for 15 minutes and found the maximum temperature rising to 62-65'C. I only have San Andreas/Vice City and Fifa with me as of now so couldn't test the high end performance but I didn't see any difference in performance than the Integrated one after running the games for 30 minutes respectively. But this thing was emitting heat during the entire time even though it's got a fan and heat sink.
The only thing it seems to have over the Intel one is a dedicated 1GB DDR3 memory and higher base clock rate. I'd give this weekend to test it on the main Slackware partition as I'm not really in the mood of altering anything in the base, but what the heck.

On another note, what would you suggest if I go for a new budget and power friendly graphics card in next 2 months, Nvidia or AMD (and open source or propriety drivers) and if given I just want good desktop performance on Linux, leave the games?

Regards.

That last question is simple... nvidia + nvidia drivers... Their linux support is unrivaled.

Looks like the case is closed then. Thanks, I just hoped AMD will keep improving both their drivers.

Regards.

Nope AMD hasn't imporved. The only driver for my ATI Radeon Ghost 7750 2GB card is the AMD driver and that's buggy!

Some of the drivers don't provide support for 3D acceleration. (at least in my case)

AMD's support of their hardware has always been lackluster and sadly Linux isn't the only victim of AMD's bad drivers. Ask experienced Windows users about how bad things get for them.

Nvidia, as disliked as they are by scores of people, are the only company that provides proper driver support for their hardware.

Wow: didn't know it was bad for Windows too:-

Had I known sooner I would have never purchased that Radeon card--

I'm happy that I opened this thread. Wow, I didn't really believe that AMD is still buggy on Windows too, I read that couple years ago though. I for now scrapped the idea of injecting my Slackware base with their binaries. Actually last night I converted my desktop into a headless box altogether. Just setting up a virtualbox headless setup on this so that I'll be able to access all my virtualbox VMs from my thinkpad.
I'll mark the thread solved. Thank you very much guys for all your inputs. LQ FTW!

Regards.