What's the best option for Radeon drivers?

[philip2009]

I'm currently considering using Ubuntu 14.0.4.1 LTS as my main desktop but I'm a bit concerned by the AMD graphics card drivers.

I started off installing the ATI card drivers listed in the Ubuntu software centre. They seemed to work great(excluding a significant malfunction when an anti screen tearing option was used) for a while on my dual monitor setup. Then I started getting constant web browser crashes that seemed to be linked to the graphics driver(fglrx listed in crash dump). So I installed some ATI drivers from xorg-edgers PPA and these so far have avoided the browser crashes(except a bit worryingly for a few minutes earlier today).

The other difference is that the software centre drivers performed better giving a glmark of about 4500 while the current drivers give a glmark of around 1600 - quite a big difference.

But anyway I'm really disappointed that something as fundamental as a display driver for a well known graphics card(in my case the AMD R9 280 with 3GB) seems to be unstable or perform poorly to a greater or less degree on Linux. What's the solution to stable AMD drivers under Linux/Ubuntu?

 

[philip2009]

After faffing around it turns out the open source Gallium drivers(from xorg-edgers) weren't being used and I needed to purge the ATI proprietary drivers. My right hand DVI monitor is working, my left monitor - DisplayPort->DVI connector - is showing a visible but corrupted desktop image, maybe I'll have better luck when I switch to DisplayPort->DisplayPort ... lead arrives soon.

I personally would change to Nvidia if I was making a full switch to linux and wanted to use it for gaming.

Care to suggest cheap NVIDIA dual mini/DisplayPort cards? Not really a graphics card nerd myself.

Bottom line is that open source is stable (for me)...

That's what I'm mainly after, rock solid stability, though obviously I'd also like reasonable card performance. The current proprietary drivers are buggy under certain circumstances.

 

[philip2009]

I'll stick with the Gallium drivers for the time being(Oibaf PPA) and frankly after staying up until 2AM to get the hardware acceleration switched on I'm too knackered to remove them.