I just installed blender 2.27 and am eager to start working with it but there’s a problem, it runs incredibly slow. When i open a pull down menu it takes something like 15 secs just to display it… It’s somewhat better in fullscreen mode, but the screen is totally messed-up (some buttons are only partially drawn while others aren’t drawn at all)…
I’ve tried installing the latest catalyst drivers but that didn’t help,…
Has anyone encountered this before, and if so, is there any solution…?
my specs:
P4 1500
Radeon 7000
WinXp
thanks
-Crawl
edit: i’ve also tried installing blender 2.25, but the same problem occures.
When I was reading the description of your problem I was a hundred percent sure you had an ATI card. I am still hoping someone will come up with a solution, but I´m afraid you should start saving money for an NVIDIA card…
I think your CPU deserves something better than a radeon 7000 anyway…
I´m not writing this for no reason: Every time I installed Blender on an ATI machine, it didn´t work, every time I installed it something else, it was fine…
My Radeon works just fine with blender…the problem is the lower end ones that come with machines and are often integrated into the motherboard. They’re generally pretty awful for anything but word processing, the net, and solitaire. Get yourself a better video card because unlike 99% of all other applications besides games, blender is heavily video card dependent.
That sucks,… ah well, back to milkshape 3d (which sucks too)…
We all know this can´t be the solution. You´ll miss the best time you can have with a computer. Even a MX 440 does the blender job fine, costing about 60 € or less. TI 4200 cards are available for 99 € in my area (much better of course).
thought i might add a few thoughts to this thread, since i have the same problem (ie. ATI and XP).
since there is no workaround/fix/magic setting, may i ask this:
who is now in charge of blender development/maintanence ??
it seems like a thread like this comes up every week (i know 'cos i’m looking for answers!!)… so why can’t the developers come up with a new release which focusses on fixing this god forsaken problem?
seems like a fairly major percentage (well, ok a small percentage… ) of the parties interested in blender are now facing the (not to appealing) prospect of forking out money for a graphics card so that they can use free software…
why should i not just fork out for software that works instead??
Blame ATI. I have an ATI 9700 Pro and I don’t like it at all. For some reason, my button bar for my 3D Viewpoint and User Preferences are all tilted, and I had to turn off Tooltips because the Tips make the buttons randomly move. I went to old ATI drivers and it fixed the visual problems but there was no 3d acceleration at all. Hopefully ATI will fix their drivers.
I almost want to put in my old GF 2 MX back in because i didn’t have these problems when that card was in my computer. O well. I love blender and dislike ATI. Next card I’m buying is another Nvidia.
Because they’re giving you a fantastic piece of software for free! It’s like someone giving away free DVDs and you moaning that they won’t work in your VCR! %|
Why not look at it this way: Buy an Nvidia card for ~£50, pretend that you just paid £50 for a really nice 3d app (ie blender) and that it came with a free gfx card
Or…
Learn to code, wade through the source and try to code a workaround for the ATI problems yourself…
Have you contacted anyone at ATI about this or read up on any incompatibilities with OpenGL? Maybe you can get ATI to look into it and fix their drivers?
for days it was all working fine… Thought i might do some maintenance on this wreck of Pc… Dark clouds rose upon the sky, angels were falling and i look up and cried out, ATI WHY!!! :< Hast thou taken the light out of my Blenderapp YOU FBEEP MOBEEEP SBEEP
anyone got drivers of an ATI 128RAGE pro 4x for Win2K that work fine with blender? I had it all working but now I’m lost… Glad I’m not the only one (sounds like message in a bottle from the Police to me)
personally, i’m just at a loss to be able to explain the problem really…
here’s why:
older (pre-reshuffle) blender versions worked fine with this card
newer versions worked fine on Win98 with this card
ditto (2) but for linux
it just seems to be this card AND xp that makes a problem.
i have all latest drivers and updates etc etc and have tried several versions.
having spent months trying to build a stable and useable system for many different purposes, i have stuck with xp (and the hardware i have)… and am not now prepared to rip up my pc o either change the gfx card or os (again!!).
also, i feel that badgering software developers (either blender or ATI) is going to be a complete waste of time… and i am certainly not going to wade through the source myslef - that’s what trained programmers get paid to do… and they’re welcome to the job. !!
…however, those run-from-cd linux distro’s look extremely intriguging…
pooblio_uk - This isn’t much of a solution but here goes anyway…
I do a lot of music production (more music than 3d) and I keep a seperate partition with a Win98 install that’s JUST for music and nothing else. It took months of tweaking to get it running nicely, so no new stuff gets installed without being thoroughly tested on another install.
Maybe you could do something similar for Blender? an XP install for day-to-day use and a 98/linux install for blendering only?
No one has stated that the antialiasing of the card be turned on (Blender does not like this). I just thought I would say this because my computer had a problem with Blender until changed the antialiasing to off or application controlled (this is with a NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4800SE so maybe no the same thing).
Have you checked the blenderbase? (that’s where I found my answer)
Yes I have ATI and it takes ages for the menus to load and buttons to be pressed. Especially when you want to select something by border select it takes sometime. I changed my monitor settings to 16 bit and the mouse used to flicker every time it was over the blender interface so I turned antialiasing. Everything was fine until I installed win 2000 or XP, with win 98 it was ok.
ATI driver issues is no excuse to release a product that only runs correctly on some videocards, especially when all the other programs/games i have run just fine, even games i’ve made myself only needed some small adjustments to run perfectly on both ATI and NVidia cards…
Before you start saying “But blender is free, stop bitchin’”,… i agree,… but they should at least put a warning on their site, saying: “doesn’t run on most ati cards, buy NVIDIA -The Way It’s Meant To Be Played-”. BAAHH!!
… but that’s just me ranting… %|
Have you checked the blenderbase? (that’s where I found my answer)
Yes, i have, but only found stuff about NVidia driver issues.
When i set my desktop color depth to 16 bit, and put blender in fullscreen, the speed is ok but some problems still remain. For example, when i close a pulldown menu the background isn’t redrawn. The same thing happens with those context help balloons,…
btw: I have access to a Radeon 9800 pro,… but i need blender to run on my own pc,…
I’ve got blender up and running again. Sometimes parts of text dissapear but i can live with that. I have installed the new drivers and after that i installed the original drivers from the driver cd. I noticed that there were a lot of xtra files that were added. I skipped the overwriting of “a newer file” ------on the road again…fuut fuut
Blender makes you happy 
I’ve got blender up and running again. Sometimes parts of text dissapear but i can live with that. I have installed the new drivers and after that i installed the original drivers from the driver cd. I noticed that there were a lot of xtra files that were added. I skipped the overwriting of “a newer file” ------on the road again…fuut fuut