Arch Linux

__tjf__

Member

Registered: 2016-03-23

Posts: 1

GPU artifacts after re-installing Arch (ATI 8750M)

Hello,

A few weeks ago I reinstalled Arch Linux on my laptop and since then there have been a variety of font rendering issues, as well as GPU artifacts scattered across the screen depending on what I am doing. I know that this all sounds crazy, and impossible but I'd like to get to the bottom of this. It seems unlikely that my discrete GPU died the second that I reinstalled Arch, but, anything is possible.

Behaviour:

• I tend to notice these artifacts only on the left hand side of my laptop screen;
• Sometimes there are no out of place artifacts;
• They become more, or less intense depending on what I'm doing (e.g. if I have a terminal next to a text editor, there might be hundreds of red vertical lines in the text editor); and
• My previous installation of Arch Linux was working A-okay, but I forget which driver(s) I installed several years ago (i.e. it may have been open source, or it may have been proprietary).

My laptop has hybrid graphics, and uses a Radeon HD 8750M discrete graphics card.

$ lspci | egrep -i radeon
01:00.0 Display controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Mars [Radeon HD 8670A/8670M/8750M]

lspci -k | grep -A2 Display    
01:00.0 Display controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Mars [Radeon HD 8670A/8670M/8750M] (rev ff)
	Kernel driver in use: fglrx_pci
	Kernel modules: radeon, fglrx

What I have tried so far:

• I installed the open source ATI catalyst driver along with mesa, however once I rebooted my laptop the GPU artifacts were still present on my screen (I have no idea if I did everything correctly);
• I attempted to install the proprietary ATI catalyst driver but the aticonfig step fails, leading me to believe that my card is incompatible with the proprietary driver (I have no idea how to tell though)

$ aticonfig --initial
aticonfig: No supported adapters detectedl

What should I do? Perhaps could I blacklist the GPU, and only use CPU graphics? How can you tell if your graphics card driver is working?

Last edited by __tjf__ (2016-03-23 23:59:28)