Linux Graphics

So you decided to get a Radeon 7790 and hope for the best...

Briefly, Michael Larabel at Phoronix recommends that you use Fedora 19/20, and he is probably right.  The Linux graphics stack is complex ( http://blog.mecheye.net/2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/) with a lot of software components and interfaces. Fedora are packaging mostly the latest drivers with most of the functional options switched on (key option is vdpau).  The radeonsi driver used by the very new cards is still a bit rough around the edges. 4,5,6000 series cards seem to be working well for people on the r600 radeon driver.

Ubuntu (in 13.10B) are not yet so up to date.  There is a ppa (oibaf) for up to 13.04 that will enable what you need, but you need to add the latest kernel yourself.  Xorg-edgers don't seem to compile for vdpau, although that may (have) change(d). 

I tried Suse and found it very good, but strongest at things (virtualization) that I cared least about. I gave up when I couldn't sudo alsamixer while in the folder which had the alsamixer binary. Still don't know why...

It is certainly possible to download and compile the complete graphics stack, but it is onerous, and requires some manual config and library binding which is a bit of a black art to me.

At the moment, my $150 video card is an obstruction and I can't smoothly play back even over-the-air HDTV, which is 720p or 1080i at most.  Nuts.  I could possibly get better performance from the onboard radeon hd4000, a tiny little chip.