Radeon HD 8730 M and Intel graphics card

[jakubm82]

Hi,

I have a laptop with Radeon HD 8730 M graphics card and Intel graphic card.
Because it's dual system, I can't install AMD drivers.

Do you have any working solution for me? Perhaps switching off Intel card will do the trick?
But I need help... I am newbie in Linux... anyone? Please?

Best regards
Jakub

[roblm]

You can check in the BIOS but there probably is no option to switch off the Intel GPU. If you're using Mint 18, then the default radeon driver is the only option for the HD 8730M card. To use it for graphics rendering, follow the instructions under PRIME GPU Offloading on this web page:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PRIME

Your other option is to install Mint 17.3, which should have a proprietary fglrx driver available in Driver Manager.

The successor to the fglrx driver is AMDGPU-PRO. The lastest version is 16.50 and it supports older AMD graphic cards back to the HD 7000 series. However, there also needs to be support from a newer kernel. You can read about it in this article:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... live&num=1

[jakubm82]

Thanks a million for your reply. My apologies for late response - I was permanently AFK.
Unfortunately I am not that literate in Linux OS - so I was not able to fully understand the content of the pages from your links.
Would it be possible for anyone to guide me step by step how to make my AMD card a primary card on my laptop?

Below are the results of inxi -G (which I understand lists all GPUs on my Laptop :

qba@qba-pc ~ $ inxi -G
Graphics: Card-1: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller
Card-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Mars [Radeon HD 8730M]
Display Server: X.Org 1.18.3 drivers: ati,radeon,intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa)
Resolution: 1600x900@59.99hz
GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Ivybridge Mobile
GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 17.0.7

And the results of cat/linuxmint/info:

qba@qba-pc ~ $ cat /etc/linuxmint/info
RELEASE=18
CODENAME=sarah
EDITION="KDE 64-bit"
DESCRIPTION="Linux Mint 18 Sarah"
DESKTOP=KDE
TOOLKIT=QT
NEW_FEATURES_URL=http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_sarah_kde_whatsnew.php
RELEASE_NOTES_URL=http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_sarah_kde.php
USER_GUIDE_URL=`yelp help:linuxmint`
GRUB_TITLE=Linux Mint 18 KDE 64-bit

Thank you in advance!
Kuba