I had the same problems when i tried to use the newer Mesa/Xorg ati drivers on my laptops ati card. I had to downgrade back to an older version
look at the output of glxinfo tell you?
look for the “OpenGL version string” anything over 6.5.1 would corrupt the drawing in blender. Or maybe your card is supported by Ati’s binary drivers, that was not an option for me.
Btw that also kills beryl and other 3d desktop support by downgrading your xorg drivers.
I already downgraded the drivers, but maybe not enough. Mine was 6.5.2 My card is the Radeon 7000 so I don’t think it is supported by Ati’s binary drivers. I don’t really care about beryl (I don’t even know what that is.) I just would like to get Blender working until I get my new computer. Hopefully I won’t have as many problems with a Nvidia card.
The newer ATI cards (radeon 9xxx, X series and HD series) don’t have much of a problem with Blender and openGL in general, not even in Linux. So if you see a good ATI deal, grab it. Otherwise get nvidia to be safe.
I have an ati catalyst visiontek radeon 7000 64 megabyte card and when I use blender to model it will start out modeling well but after a short time it begins to slowdown until I have to save my work, close, and re-open the .blend file. I also cannot get the frame rate up past 15 but it takes quite a bit of objects before the frames go down. I don’t care about frame rate I don’t want to struggle with modeling with the slowdowns. Any help?