# Console not working with Radeon cards. Does exist alternative to Nvidia?



## Snurg (Feb 8, 2018)

After buying an AMD/ATI Radeon graphics card I notice that ctrl-alt-Fx does not work.
xorg does not switch to console. Not even blind input to console seems possible.

When searching for solutions I read that Radeon cards allegedly work _only_ with vt(), but not with syscons (sc()). Is this really true?

If that is true, then I have to ditch radeon.
Because, newcons (vt()) is a definitive no-go. At least for me. Too few features, too many bugs/issues.

Is there an alternative to using Nvidia?


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## SirDice (Feb 8, 2018)

The vt(4) console driver supports KMS, sc(4) does not. Newer ATI and Intel cards/drivers use KMS. So yes, you would be 'stuck' with vt(4).


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## Snurg (Feb 9, 2018)

I now have removed the Radeon card and installed the Nvidia card back again.

I could have lived with vt(), but the main reason was that I failed to get suspend/resume work reliably with the Radeon card.
There were just too many issues.
Xorg() failing to start when turning tearing off via xorg.conf. It worked only when done via `xrandr` command in .xinitrc.
Radeon() driver uploading wrong microcode. (According to xorg.0.log it uploaded a microcode of an older series to the card even though the correct microcode files were present).
And more things.

I guess there is really no alternative to Nvidia...

And as long as the vesa.ko driver doesn't get fixed (the devs know the bug for years but don't bother to fix it  ), I have anyway to use a custom kernel without vt() and vesa() to have suspend/resume work.


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