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arew264

Member

From: Friendswood, Texas, US

Registered: 2006-07-01

Posts: 394

Website

ATI XPress 200M and Blender

Okay, so my laptop has ATI XPress 200M integrated graphics. I've been running without an xorg.conf for a while now, and from the logs, XOrg is loading the... Radeon driver (the open source one), which correctly identifes my card as "ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)."
On the other hand, it also says this:
(II) RADEON(0): Direct rendering experimental on RS400/Xpress 200 enable

I'm trying to run Blender, and Bad Things(TM) are happening. When I select something, it simply doesn't appear selected, and if I click a second time, a huge gray outline of the object I'm trying to select will appear. With glxgears, the gears appear on top of any other window, IE if I start glxgears then put firefox over it, the gears are drawn over firefox.

I realized that there was a major problem when I saw this:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread?t=56932

For people that don't want to read that, it's basically a procedure for Windows users to replace atioglxx.dll with a renamed nvoglnt.dll. Yes, they're replacing part of the ATI driver with the NVidia driver. In the comments, a guy with this same card said that it "fixed" Blender on his card. Clearly there is a problem here.

Anyway, has anyone gotten Blender or 3D to work well on this card or another ATI card that's problematic? If that's not the case, what's the simplest way to force XOrg to use software rendering?

I thought I was home free when I uninstalled Catalyst and installed XFCE, and XFCE can composite my desktop perfectly with no major performance problems. Apparantly that was simply not the case.

AndyRTR

Developer

From: Magdeburg/Germany

Registered: 2005-10-07

Posts: 1,641

Re: ATI XPress 200M and Blender

my 200M card is completely unusable with DRI. 2 of 3 times when starting X the whole system freezes. When it comes up glxinfo states only OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer.

I switched back to XAA that gives much better performance than EXA in 2D here.

So go with catalyst or wait for AmD/ATI driver rewrite that will probably come out with kms in kernel 2.6.31.

arew264

Member

From: Friendswood, Texas, US

Registered: 2006-07-01

Posts: 394

Website

Re: ATI XPress 200M and Blender

Odd, the Radeon driver is perfectly stable for me, it just doesn't like to do 3D. As I think I said, I can run XFCE with compositing turned on with no problems at all. Video is fine as well.
Anyway, Catalyst broke support for my card with literally every other release, but I'll try it.

Fortunately, I have a desktop that can run 3d with no problems. Yay for NVidia. They've at least supported the linux community with good drivers.

Last edited by arew264 (2009-06-14 14:30:07)

arew264

Member

From: Friendswood, Texas, US

Registered: 2006-07-01

Posts: 394

Website

Re: ATI XPress 200M and Blender

Radeon and KMS fixed everything for me. Have you tried it?

EDIT: Wait, hold that thought. KMS fixed Blender because Mesa was falling back to software rendering. Oops, fixing that...

Last edited by arew264 (2009-08-13 05:31:51)