Solution for problems with blender and ATI graphic cards

[Neo]

Ok I have no solution to make blender work perfectly with an ATI card but the only way to make ati coders aware of our problem is that every one who has an ATI card and problems with blender (so, most of people which are reading this topic) send them a mail here http://apps.ati.com/driverfeedback/
It is important to do that because it is an old problem ant it is getting worse with new catalyst drivers.
Thank you

[z3r0 d]

Originally Posted by Neo Ok I have no solution to make blender work perfectly with an ATI card but the only way to make ati coders aware of our problem is that every one who has an ATI card and problems with blender (so, most of people which are reading this topic) send them a mail here http://apps.ati.com/driverfeedback/ It is important to do that because it is an old problem ant it is getting worse with new catalyst drivers. Thank you

you imply there is only one problem with the ati drivers which cause blender to not work as it should

[Neo]

you imply there is only one problem with the ati drivers which cause blender to not work as it should

No, as I know, in fact there are two main problems with ati cards in blender, the one with bad antialiased fonts when internationalisation is turned on, and the one that makes blender use 100% of the CPU after a few minutes of utillisation what makes everything very slow. These are totaly different problems and there are probably other bugs that I have not experienced, but the second one makes blender totaly unusable and happends for sure if you use catalyst drivers.
So, thats for me the 'big one' thats why I say that it's an old problem...

[:wumpus:]

I am experiencing this slowdown issue too. (100% CPU usage)

Radeon 9600XT + Latest drivers + no special settings here

What is causing this? Why is blender functioning great on NVidia cards but not on ATIs? Why does my ATI card perform good in games and my own opengl applications but not Blender?

[IoN_PuLse]

Is anti-aliasing on? Turn that off.

[:wumpus:]

Yes, I never enabled that, my settings are the default neutral card settings, it's all set to Application dependent.

[z3r0 d]

Originally Posted by :wumpus: I am experiencing this slowdown issue too. (100% CPU usage) Radeon 9600XT + Latest drivers + no special settings here What is causing this? Why is blender functioning great on NVidia cards but not on ATIs? Why does my ATI card perform good in games and my own opengl applications but not Blender?

as far as I can tell it is the drivers

again today I tried different versions (3.5, 3.6, 3.7) with no luck <-- for my render window problem
I may go back to 4.1

I have a radeon 9600SE, and windows 98SE

I also can't render using the render window (have to use the view) because blender will freeze (or sometimes do odd things like draw in the render window and respond to events in the blender window)

[IoN_PuLse]

Have you tried just forcing anti-aliasing off? (ie: not application specific)

[:wumpus:]

Originally Posted by IoN_PuLse Have you tried just forcing anti-aliasing off? (ie: not application specific)

That does not seem to be possible in 4.1 drivers.
Choices are 2x, 4x, 6x and application

[IoN_PuLse]

Those weird ATI drivers (with nvidia you can force things like that completely off, along with the other options you mentioned)

Hmmm

[z3r0 d]

older drivers seem not to have the slowdown problems

I don't know what ver I am running now but I think the problems came with 3.8 or 3.9. I have heard people say that 3.6 and 3.7 work.

(I am running 3.5, 3.6, or 3.7 right now, no slowdowns but I can't use the render window)

[Neo]

I don't know what ver I am running now but I think the problems came with 3.8 or 3.9. I have heard people say that 3.6 and 3.7 work.

Did you try 3.9 ? It's not perfect, but the problem 'disappeared' with this version for some people. In fact, the problem is still here :-( but the CPU don't goes up to 100%, so blender is nearly usable and on some fast systems the slowdown is invisible... for someone who has never tried blender with a nvidia card...

[IoN_PuLse]

It's interesting that at my previous college, the lab had 9800 PROs in all the machines and they ran a few of the catalysts, and I had no problems running blender and/or rendering from it either.

[:wumpus:]

I tried a lot of possible settings, but it just doesn't want to work. Blegh@ATI.

[zilppuri]

So any real information on this subject?

Do any of these work to fix the problem:
-changing drivers (Catalyst drivers)
-using "thirdparty" drivers (Omega, DNA..)
-decreasing hardware acceleration
-changing blender version
-changing to linux

I noticed that decreasing hardware acceleration helped somewhat, but soon it started to slow down again.

[z3r0 d]

Originally Posted by zilppuri So any real information on this subject? Do any of these work to fix the problem: -changing drivers (Catalyst drivers)

yes, 3.6 or 3.7 may be the latest without the problem

Originally Posted by zilppuri -using "thirdparty" drivers (Omega, DNA..)

no

Originally Posted by zilppuri -decreasing hardware acceleration

only if all the way down

Originally Posted by zilppuri -changing blender version

no

Originally Posted by zilppuri -changing to linux

kind of, using linux drivers may make some things better (no slowdown with prolonged use), but I have trouble when I do anything with uv mapped textures (particularly if more than one).

mesa works well though, if you can live without hardware acceleration

[zilppuri]

On 12.2.2004 ATI released new Catalyst 4.2, but it doesn't fix the problem. Seems like they have lot's of problems with different programs (mostly games) that they fix one by one. It isn't very cool to buy a product that needs to be specially tailored to work correctly in software it should already have "full support" to.

Anyways, I tried to change to ATI Catalyst 3.6 and 3.7, but the installation process stopped just before installing the actual drivers.
Also I wouldn't want to use Mesa, because I have rather slow computer and had difficulties running some of my scenes even when I had hardware acceleration working with geforce.

Not being able to use Blender is driving me nuts!

[Neo]

Not being able to use Blender is driving me nuts!

me too ! It's really annoying...I thing I will contact ati drivers feedback...again. Anyway, how tu use opengl dirvers of catalyst 3.8 with the latest catalyst drivers (windows) ?

[ndnchief]

Adapter: All-IN-WONDER
Chip Type: Radeon 7200 AGP (QD)



Provider: ATI Technologies Inc.
Date: 8/15/2002
Version: 6.13.10.6166


Under the Open GL tab in the (Main Settings) I checked "Custom Settings"
In the (Custom Settings) I have 'Application Preference' checked and
Anti-aliasing Disabled.

As far as Texture Preference and MipMap detail level they are set to
High Quality.

Wait for verticle sync I have Application Preference checcked.


With this driver and these settings I have no problem running Blender. But when
I attempted to up-date my drivers, it made blender so slow I was not even able
to use it. But now Blender is intantaneous, I click a button and before my finger
releases off the mouse button it has switched windows. When I updated, clicking
buttons, or selecting vertices, it would take a couple of seconds to perform
these tasks. So I know your pain. Anyway, I went all the way back to August
2002 and used the above mentioned driver and all was well again. Hope you can get
your stuff working again. I just thought letting you know what works super good
for me might help you, I hope so, Good luck!!!!!

NDNChief......

[goldentaiji]

Hmm, 5 days since the latest post, but I just wanted to say I have the same problem too. I have a ATI All In Wonder 8500 AGP Graphics card running on a 2.5 Ghz machine with 640 MB Ram. It's funny though. I'm running Blender 2.32 on the machine and after about 5-7 minutes of usage, Blender starts freezing on me. It starts to get extremely slow.

I also have a labtop that I run Blender 2.32 on. It has a ATI Radeon mobile 32MB video RAM. However, Blender runs perfectly fine on the labtop. No freezing, nothing, works perfectly and it's still an ATI. Wonder why.

So, it's probably got to be the different drivers for the 2 machines. But I really hope ATI can fix this kind of problem in its future releases of drivers.

Jason Lin