ATI driver issues

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Hi fellas (back for a moment after a long sojourn - no, I don’t expect anybody to remember me),

Bought me a new pc back in July for video editing and finally got it working this last Thursday. Long story - the upshot is, be careful of Asus machines and don’t buy the Pundit-R. Anyway, after installing all my junk and getting stuff copied over, I went to fire up blender to work on some shots in the trailer for the film.

The first time, I was lucky. I got as far as moving the camera around, adding some text, moving the light a bit, deleting the default cube…and then it locked up. Couldn’t move the mouse, couldn’t kill Blender, couldn’t do anything. Total system freeze. Several seconds later, the monitor blinks at me and comes back to life in 8-bit colour, 640x480, sporting a snappy error dialogue saying that the driver “ati2dvag.dll” had errors. Restart, etc. Blender wouldn’t come back; I had to forcibly kill it. Good thing I didn’t get much work in.

I figured it was a fluke; tried it again the next day (the first time it happened was at 2am and by then I figured I might as well go to bed, since the chances of getting this - to quote one illustrious Pundit owner - ‘wossname’ Pundit to boot again right away were slim). Doggone if the same thing didn’t happen. Same error, everything - only this time, I didn’t get past selecting the text I’d created the last time. Blam, the whole thing locks up.

Funnily enough, I’m suspecting my ati2dvag driver.

I’ve done the proper searches and nobody’s ever had this issue without relating it to McAfee or Norton, and I’m not rich enough to license either of those. So, has anybody ever heard of this particular issue before or know any workarounds? Getting this whole mess working has been one big workaround after another, so I’m not opposed to the sledgehammer method if that’s what it takes to get Blender functioning as it properly should. That would be a first for this PC.

Any help would be appreciated. And, if nobody has any clue how to fix this, I have a very nice, very cheap, brand-spankin’-new Asus Pundit-R machine for sale. 2.8Ghz, 800Mhz FSB, integrated ATI RS300 graphics chipset, front firewire & audio, 4:1 card reader, dual-screen capabilities right out of the box…

#2

I’ve only ever seen intel systems do that [subdivide something a lot and enter face select mode]…

what is the RS300? is that like the X300? have you tried the latest drivers? what version of windows?

#3

I’ve only ever seen intel systems do that [subdivide something a lot and enter face select mode]…

Well, this is an intel box…

what is the RS300? is that like the X300?

To be honest, I don’t know. It’s good enough to run Age of Empires 3 on low settings pretty well. Since besides film editing (which isn’t very graphics-intensive except for any CG modelling) I’ll mostly be using this machine for graphic design work, I was mostly interested in the dual-screen capabilities. So, I didn’t pay too much attention to the graphics chipset.

have you tried the latest drivers?

AFAIK, I have the latest of everything.

what version of windows?

XP Pro (SP2 :().

#4

Blender rellies on good OpenGL support. Most new computers ship with video drivers provided by Microsoft, which have terrible OpenGL support. You need to download the latest drivers from the maker of your GPU chip. In your case ATI.

#5

z3ro d: I was mistaken. This has the Radeon 9100 IGP. I don’t know what that RS300 is.

#6

I followed the Catalyst 3.9 fix found elsewhere here, and that seems to have completely solved the problem, although the symptoms were not the same. Whatever it takes, I guess…

“Beat it out with a sledge hammer, cut it with an axe,
paint it with a broom, and if it doesn’t look like this one, you
didn’t spend enough time on it.”

It’s ugly, but it gets you there.