It can be incredibly difficult to find the exact driver for your FirePro APU-based hardware unit, even directly on the website of AMD or a related manufacturer. There is hope for Graphics Card users because they can usually solve the problem by updating their device drivers. Device drivers can fail without any apparent reason. Troubles With Driver UpdatesĪMD's FirePro APU are subject to corrupt and out-of-date device drivers. If you decide to install the AMD proprietary fglrx driver, best fetch it directly from AMD's website, as the versions in Ubuntu's repos are not quite up-to-date.Windows has a valid driver for APU.

But as long as the Xorg driver works fine, you don't need fglrx. So it depends on what you need most: A driver of which you know it works (as you are currently using it) or one that supports newer technology, such as later OpenGL versions, e.g.

I've heard and read rumors that the APU consumed less power when using fglrx, leading to a longer lasting on-battery-time, but I can't confirm this as I run my notebook on AC power 99% of time.

Programs using OpenCL (perform certain calculations on the GPU rather than the CPU) only work with fglrx, and not with the Xorg driver.

My boot animation was drawn in an incorrect screen ratio when using fglrx instead of the Xorg driver, although I mostly blame the unacceptably buggy UEFI implementation from HP.

the menu item selection in Cinnamon's launcher would start to jump around with fglrx if the mouse was between two entries and not hovering the text, whereas the problem doesn't occur with the Xorg driver.

The Xorg driver seems to produce fewer glitches when rendering the desktop.

However, I've already played some games that would only work when not using fglrx. And before anyone asks, yes, Bioshock Infinite has been ported to run natively on Linux. Bioshock Infinite requires fglrx, as the Mesa OpenGL version supported by the Xorg driver (in my case OpenGL 3.3) is too old to support the methods used by this game.

fglrx supports a more recent OpenGL version E.g.I've changed a lot between both drivers, so here are my experiences, also with an AMD A8 APU, but a different model:

If you don't have any problems with the Xorg driver, and no program require the fglrx driver, I'd stick to the default one.

Amd apu drivers mouse glitch