I have a brand new Dell Latitude 131L that has the dual core turion64X2 1.6ghz processor in it.
blender is incredibly slow on this machine than my 4 year old Dell C640 I retired. So slow I would call it unusable.
anyone have an idea why? This laptop is supposed to have better video (256meg ATI card) and lots more processor than the old laptop, yet blender runs like it is on a old 400mhz P-III.
any suggestions?
Do you mean that the user interface feels sluggish? If that is the case, what are the symptoms? It could be that it is an issue related to the graphics card. It is well known that some ATI cards tend to cause problems with Blender.
Also note that this thread should have been posted to an appropriate support forum.
Ati cards hate blender. Also, just as tip, to milk your money’s worth out of your dual-core, turn on 2-threaded rendering in blender.
Really? Are the drivers finally fixed now? /
User interface is incredibly slow. Click on a menu and 3-6 seconds later your click is noticed. click on anything and you have a 3-6 second wait. SSE2 optomized builds are noticably faster but still incredibly slow.
I tried the latest drivers from ATI, I had to back them down as I had all kinds of errors on the ATI control panel. the drivers from back in November actually work better than the latest ones.
So in other words, if you have ATI then you are stuck with unuseable blender, great. As all AMD laptops are forced to have ATI because of AMD’s decision to buy them.
I guess this post needs to serve as a warning to others, if you use blender do not buy the AMD dual core laptops.
thanks all. Until ATI decides to actually release working drivers It looks like I’m screwed, and I’m betting they wont as the new darling is Vista and not XP.
It depends on the operating system also. I have an ATI card (Mobility Radeon 9700) and found that Blender runs better on Ubuntu than on Windows. I have no glitches at all on Ubuntu unlike on Windows. Such a glitch would be jerky movement of mouse in case I use background image on a 3d viewport.
<edit> You could try setting rt value found in Buttons Window -> Anim to 2. It fixes menu issues on some ATI cards. </edit>
Found a solution, and this one is a bizzare one. After searching all day long for the answer, It is in fact a problem with ATI and their drivers. Specifically their atioglxx.dll GLx driver. It must have been written by a intern and never touched for years now.
After all my attempts to fix this I stumbled accidentally across http://www.vistainsight.com/?p=25 and found that this guy discovered that replacing the ati GLX library with a older NVIDIA glx library all of a sudden things start working right.
Maybe ATI should farm out their driver and library writing to Nvidia. Basically you rename Nvidia’s GLX library to ATI’s name and plop it in the blender install directory. Blender uses the correct nvidia library instead of the buggy ATI library and all is well.
Thanks everyone for your help, and I still strongly suggest that everyone stay away from ATI chipset laptops until they figure out how to write a working driver and library.
Cool, most of Blender runs twice as fast on my laptop with shoddy ATi card using that driver…
Not all is faster though. Having an animation layout where a few spaces need to be updated at the very same time, is still unusably slow (while that’s a bit more usable when turning down the acceleration settings).
There’s also a bug in sculpting mode which causes the normals not to be calculated correctly (fixable by doing a Tab and back). The smooth brush doesn’t work at all.
Still very nice though!