# amd hd 4500 graphics replacement

## njcwotx

I have an ATI HD 4550 video card, its always a hassle to get the drivers loaded with each update, and today, the latest update appears to not be compatible yet, or if they are ever going to get this updated.

I decided to go out and just buy a new graphics card, but I want to get one that is inexpensive but is modern capabilities.  Not doing major gaming, I run vmware workstation and i use opengl etc.

Whats a really good replacement that will be stable, lots of compatibility and few headaches.

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## DaggyStyle

can you explain what hassle are you referring to? I have two ati cards on my system (3650 and 5450) and my upgrade process includes kernel, libdrm, mesa and xf86-video-ati when needed.

I cannot see any hassle in this as it is a normal update procedure which can be done with any other pkg on the system.

anyway, any nVidia card should do the trick.

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## Gusar

@DaggyStyle: You have no hassles because you use the open driver. But some people want (or even need) full performance out of their card, so they use the closed driver. And that one *does* bring hassles with it, especially since AMD has dropped support for all pre-HD5000 from the latest drivers. There is a "legacy" branch for HD2000-HD4000, but it's far from the quality of Nvidia's legacy branches.

@njcwotx: As was already said, any Nvidia card will do. There is a wide range of Kepler cards, from 610 to 690, go as high as your budget allows. The GT640 is very nice and the GTX650 isn't that much more expensive.

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## DaggyStyle

 *Gusar wrote:*   

> @DaggyStyle: You have no hassles because you use the open driver. But some people want (or even need) full performance out of their card, so they use the closed driver. And that one *does* bring hassles with it, especially since AMD has dropped support for all pre-HD5000 from the latest drivers. There is a "legacy" branch for HD2000-HD4000, but it's far from the quality of Nvidia's legacy branches.
> 
> @njcwotx: As was already said, any Nvidia card will do. There is a wide range of Kepler cards, from 610 to 690, go as high as your budget allows. The GT640 is very nice and the GTX650 isn't that much more expensive.

 

he doesn't game so the is no problem using the foss, also if the problem with legacy is xorg, that is a valid reason to stop using legacy drivers which are unmaintained.

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## njcwotx

 *DaggyStyle wrote:*   

>  *Gusar wrote:*   @DaggyStyle: You have no hassles because you use the open driver. But some people want (or even need) full performance out of their card, so they use the closed driver. And that one *does* bring hassles with it, especially since AMD has dropped support for all pre-HD5000 from the latest drivers. There is a "legacy" branch for HD2000-HD4000, but it's far from the quality of Nvidia's legacy branches.
> 
> @njcwotx: As was already said, any Nvidia card will do. There is a wide range of Kepler cards, from 610 to 690, go as high as your budget allows. The GT640 is very nice and the GTX650 isn't that much more expensive. 
> 
> he doesn't game so the is no problem using the foss, also if the problem with legacy is xorg, that is a valid reason to stop using legacy drivers which are unmaintained.

 

I never had issues with the inital configs, this system had been running great on that card until emerge system and world, then it came up unworkable with driver problems in Xorg.0.log.

I had both open source and mfg drivers working but when I got to the combination of VMWare Workstation, dual screen and opengl.  The mfg drivers performed outstanding compared to the open source driver, and it worked for quite some time.

I narrowed my issue to the version of xorg after emerge system and world.

All worked fine before I updated xorg to whatever version it became.  Readme on nfg driver was only good up to a previous version.  I reverted back to my image I took before updating, and its all back to normal.

I will use this as an excuse to go out and get a heftier card.  Old card worked well for its use, but I bet a nicer card might not hurt.

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## UlFie

 *njcwotx wrote:*   

> dual screen

 

This is (unfortunately) the only reason why I cannot use the FOSS driver (on some laptop featuring a HD3400), it simply does not support it. Then again, the closed driver never fixed even basic things. Move a window around fastly (or scroll horizontally, or even vertically in a window that is partially behind another one) and you end up with random patterns all over the place. And dimensions of the two differently sized screens (1680x1050 and 1600x1200) seem to be reported wrongly, KDE's task bar ends 80 pixels from the right border and full screen mplayer extends below the lower border of the screen. Not to mention occasional crashes were the mouse cursor hangs close to the border between the two screens and flickers and I have to log in from a remote computer to shut the system down...

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## DaggyStyle

 *UlFie wrote:*   

>  *njcwotx wrote:*   dual screen 
> 
> This is (unfortunately) the only reason why I cannot use the FOSS driver (on some laptop featuring a HD3400), it simply does not support it. Then again, the closed driver never fixed even basic things. Move a window around fastly (or scroll horizontally, or even vertically in a window that is partially behind another one) and you end up with random patterns all over the place. And dimensions of the two differently sized screens (1680x1050 and 1600x1200) seem to be reported wrongly, KDE's task bar ends 80 pixels from the right border and full screen mplayer extends below the lower border of the screen. Not to mention occasional crashes were the mouse cursor hangs close to the border between the two screens and flickers and I have to log in from a remote computer to shut the system down...

 

afaik, this is very much doable with the foss, there is a page in gentoo wiki regarding this.

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## Gusar

 *DaggyStyle wrote:*   

> afaik, this is very much doable with the foss, there is a page in gentoo wiki regarding this.

 

Yeah, the radeon open source driver is xrandr1.2 and can therefore handle this stuff. So it's either wrong configuration, or KDE is screwing up. There will be a dead area where the mouse cursor can disappear to, but window managers are (or should be) capable of not extending fullscreen windows into it.

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## UlFie

 *Gusar wrote:*   

> xrandr1.2

 

While xrandr can do weird things, to the best of my knowledge it does not allow to set up two screens (as in :0.0 and :0.1), all you can do is set up one screen (or rather, change the configuration of one screen that is originally defined in xorg.conf and friends or auto-configured) parts of which appear on the monitors. As a consequence, maximizing a window results in parts of the window appearing on the two monitors, and if they have different dimensions, some parts will even be completely off of the monitors. IMHO, this is hardly usable, certainly not for me.

I tried really hard to set up a dual screen system using the FOSS radeon and radeonhd drivers when I got that laptop, and unless things have changed again since then, the documentation for these drivers clearly says they do not allow the traditional dual screen approach (but at least radeon did in former times).

Unfortunately, KDE dropped dual screen support somewhere in the 3.5.x line (between 3.5.7 and 3.5.10, I think, and I am not sure what exactly has returned to KDE4 in the mean time), so my second screen is running twm these days. And I am sure there is no misconfiguration, all worked fine on a previous laptop featuring nVidia graphics. Intel does not support dual screen at all, so guess what alternative I would personally prefer.

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## Gusar

 *UlFie wrote:*   

> While xrandr can do weird things, to the best of my knowledge it does not allow to set up two screens (as in :0.0 and :0.1), all you can do is set up one screen (or rather, change the configuration of one screen that is originally defined in xorg.conf and friends or auto-configured) parts of which appear on the monitors.

 

That is correct.

 *UlFie wrote:*   

> As a consequence, maximizing a window results in parts of the window appearing on the two monitors, and if they have different dimensions, some parts will even be completely off of the monitors.

 

That is not correct. All clients - well, all that link to libXinerama (yes, even xrandr uses libXinerama to talk to clients, so make sure all your stuff is compiled with the xinerama USE flag) - are informed about the dimensions and positions of the displays. So the client is aware of the screen size and it's boundaries, and when the client is a window manager, it'll know to do the right thing when you want to fullscreen an app.

 *UlFie wrote:*   

> I tried really hard to set up a dual screen system using the FOSS radeon and radeonhd drivers when I got that laptop, and unless things have changed again since then, the documentation for these drivers clearly says they do not allow the traditional dual screen approach (but at least radeon did in former times).

 

The dual display mode is called Zaphod, and from what I know, the radeon driver supports it. Don't know off the top of my head how to set it up. The xrandr way is very, very simple:

```
Section "Monitor"

    Identifier  "DVI-0"

    Option      "Primary"  "true"

EndSection

Section "Monitor"

    Identifier  "DVI-1"

    Option      "RightOf"  "DVI-0"

EndSection
```

That's it. Identifiers are the names of the outputs, you can get them by running xrandr at the commandline.

 *UlFie wrote:*   

> Intel does not support dual screen at all, so guess what alternative I would personally prefer.

 

I'm not sure about Intel and Zaphod, it did not support it for a while, but nowadays I think it does again. But the xrandr way works very, very well with Intel. I know, I use it on my netbook.

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