Re: Free drivers for AMD Radeon (Vaio S)

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 12 Sep 2011 10:27:17 -0400, Dan wrote:

> I would like to buy a Vaio S. It has the user-switchable graphics card
> AMD Radeon 6470M. 

Then take a look into this Ubuntu forum thread (post #11) where a user 
talks about the status of that card in his distribution:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?s=467b83bbff9b48f6a32dc2c2d06bf452&t=1699832&page=2

> I would like to know how good are the open-source drivers for the AMD
> Radeon Cards. I read that AMD gives a better support for the open
> -source drivers than Nvidia. Is that right?

Generally speaking, I'd say that ATI VGA cards/chipsets supported by 
radeon driver (FOSS) use to behave quite well, the main problem here 
is to have a card that is fully supported, you may want to check 
Xorg's driver status page.

In regards to the second question, yes, "radeon" driver is one of the 
most tested (it's older), most advanced and with better overall 
performance of the main FLOSS VGA 3D drivers, which mainly includes 
"intel" (Intel cards) and "nouveau" (nvidia cards).

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón