Blender is really slow after new driver.

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I have an ATI graphics card. Blender worked fine until now but I just installed the newest catalist drivers and now blender is really slow, especially when I select objects and vertices , faces etc…
Also all the menus in blender dont respond well
what can I do?

2

Go back to the driver that works.

3

Yeah. You could also give the Omega Drivers a try.

4

I know that my HD4850 is really sensitive to what driver version I use with XP. If I use any of the newer drivers, then the 2D draw performance in XP tanks. It’s like using a 10 year old computer. The lastest driver version works great in Windows 7, though. So in XP, I’m stuck on the one version and I just don’t update it (even though I try each month and end up rolling back after the same slowdown occurs.)

5

sometimes ATI mess-up their drivers, specially for linux. wait for newer version.

last time i used omega drivers i was not charmed. so i prefer buggy ati drivers.

6

I have the same problem with Windows 7 and ATI drivers. Yes I know there was an update but that didnt apply to me. So right now when I feel like using Blender I start up my Linux and do it in there.

7

It’s has been documented by ATI that the 64 bit drivers have NO OpenGL support. The 32 bit drivers work fine (at least for me)

8

thanks for the help guys
first of all I don’t have the old driver.
The current driver is 32 bit so there should be nothing wrong with it.
Do any of you think it may be a problem with blender?

Oh and by the way… I might buy a new PC in the next few months
Should I choose an ATI graphics card or an Nvidia graphics card? I wont be doing much gaming. Mostly stuff like blender and GIMP

9

Then you dont need a video cart. take S3 video card with 32 MB ram from the basement and go on :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Nvidia and Ati drivers suck on linux, but i think Nvidia’s drivers suck more. However, atis are cheaper, but slower for gaming. Better check out some test and benchmarks (look around Toms’s hardware or etc.) Its your choice.

10

You know, I wrote to ATI tech support about this, because I want to buy an
ATI Radeon 4850. They say it’s TOTALLY not true. They say that
OpenGL is so supported on 64 bit drivers.

Why do people spread stuff like this around?

11
  1. Because I tried it…and it’s true
  2. It’s in the release notes for the driver
    Release Notes

I’m only talking about 64 bit Windows 7, not Vista.

12

I can verify that the OpenGL support in Windows 7 64bit is non-existant. Blender 2.5 even runs awfully on it. On Windows 7 32bit Blender flies though.

/Nathan

13

well, maybe sticking with a non-beta OS is the thing to do then.

14

Non-beta OS aside, there seem to be some drivers that just work better than other. My friend and I also own 8800GT’s and run XP. We both noticed that after a certain driver update, our 2D draw speed was SUPER slow. It also caused the CPU to go really high for a few seconds just moving stuff around the desktop. Rolled back to the old driver and it’s fine.

I know that people say to use the latest and greatest driver, but from my experience, if it isn’t broken and everything is working correct, then don’t update just for the sake of updating.