Installing new AMD Drivers in Ubuntu 11.04

I recently installed Ubuntu 11.04 on my desktop and gave the restricted drivers coming with the install for my ATI card a shot, expecting them to work flawlessly. They did, in the regard that they kept the 4870X2 quiet, as opposed to the noisy default open-source drivers. They did not, however, have decent performance. Movies were choppy and moving any kind of window was an ugly sight.

Looking to remedy the situation, I looked towards AMD.com and found the newer 11.8 drivers and followed this walkthrough to update them.

I now enjoy both a quiet card and good performance.

Low FPS in StarCraft II

Ever since I set up my computer and installed the ATI Catalyst drivers, I never bothered to uncheck the box for Adaptive Anti-Aliasing, assuming it was a feature only turned on if regular Anti-Aliasing was in use. As it turns, out, it's not.

As I returned from my holiday and got to install StarCraft II on my own computer, I played a few games versus the A.I to get used to the game. One of the games I played was on the map called Twilight Fortress versus three computer A.Is, and I started out with an FPS of 20-25 (in-game FPS-counter is displayed by pressing Ctrl + Alt + F) and found that to be far too low as opposed to what my machine should be able to do, and not consistent with the experience I had on other maps.

I started to fiddle with the in-game settings and eventually found a working setup, but I couldn't get over the feeling of having a crippled computer, so I went into the Catalyst Control Center and checked out every setting under the 3D tab. When I got to the Adaptive Anti-Aliasing and disabled that, everything went alot smoother.