Well, yeah, you’re not going to get any fancy per pixel stuff, using GDI Generic is what the old one did too. Unless you’re developing games, basic acceleration should be enough.
ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 (200/M) 256mb
The new-old atioglxx.dll (FGLMAX.dll):
- Renderer: GDI Generic
- Vendor: Microsoft Corporation
- Version: 1.1.0
- Extensions:
GL_WIN_swap_hint GL_EXT_bgra GL_EXT_paletted_texture
- Simplistic almost useless benchmark:
Redrawing all areas 10 times took 0.4901 seconds.
Old atioglxx.dll:
- Renderer: GDI Generic
- Vendor: Microsoft Corporation
- Version: 1.1.0
- Extensions:
GL_WIN_swap_hint GL_EXT_bgra GL_EXT_paletted_texture
- Simplistic almost useless benchmark:
Redrawing all areas 10 times took 0.6977 seconds.
Without atioglxx.dll:
- Renderer: RADEON XPRESS Series x86/MMX/3DNow!/SSE2
- Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
- Version: 2.0.6012 WinXP Release
- Extensions:
EDIT: Lot -o- Extensions. Removed to save space.
- Simplistic almost useless benchmark:
Redrawing all areas 10 times took 5.4539 seconds.
EDIT2: the best solution though, would probably be to install Linux. Laptop folks, be sure to get a new ATI driver instead of using the one the distro comes with - or it will crash Blender and most ogl apps.
thought i should make this clear for anyone who tries the mod:
this methd does NOT give you true workstation FireGL performance nor any real hardware acceleration at all. It basically disables the troublesome ATi OGL driver, loads a generic, non-hardware accelerated OpenGL 1.1 driver for blender, and does most of the viewport rendering in the CPU.
I’ll agree that it won’t give you the performance of a current FireGL. But you say it’s not hardware accelerated? GDI Generic is still 3d acelleration, just the old OpenGL 1.1. But either way, on certain video adapters that it works with, it’s faster than the other atioglxx.dll and definitely faster than without any dll.
As far as I know, GDI Generic is Microsoft’s software implementation of OpenGL, which is why the “fancy” extensions are not supported or shown in the benchmark result.
Doesn’t work for me, i.e. same behaviour as with the standard ATI driver.
So basically the software emulation of OpenGL is faster than the vendor’s drivers that use hardware accelaration? What a crap. I had no problems whatsoever with a quite old Nvidia card with slow ram, so I didn’t think that any currently sold chipset could fall behind that. What a mistake.
Aha. Isn’t the ATI linux driver closed source? And doesn’t that mean I have to use old versions of the kernel just to get the graphics adapter run with hardware accelaration? And, according to the ATI linux driver FAQ, not even all cards are supported (esp. mobility). If I would use a desktop system mainly I would have thrown away the ATI card long ago.
Btw I am very surprised Blender tries to use a vendor-specific dll lying around in it’s program directory. Isn’t access to the graphics adapter something that should be provided by the OS solely? Or is this just a workaround for problems like this?
Blender doesn’t do that, it’s just the way the whole OpenGL thing works on Windows (opengl32.dll gets loaded, things are passed on to the vendor-specific implementation, yadda yadda)
Normally, GDI Generic is indeed software rendering, but I kind of doubt if the speedup I have is because it’s rendered in software (the cpu in this laptop I’m using is a very slow celeron, which shouldn’t be able to render at these speeds).
Yes, this has been discussed before. I have the Omega drivers installed both on the old work station (old ATI) and an ATI based Vaio notebook. The driver makes a huge difference. One of the nicest things about it is the method used for screen restore after an app has lost focus. Default ATI would leave the screen undrawn until a render had completed, the Omega method redraws the entire window every time the render engine draws anything. That means you can go tool around on the web while rendering and then go back to check on how things are going with blender. Omega drivers also fixed some sorry aliasing problems ATI’s default driver has.
ATI; good hardware, really lame software. Hopefully AMD will reem out the entire division.
Ok. And the search order is to search in the program directory first, because so you can use specific libs, if needed (so this is generally a good idea).
Right, it seems to use only basic hardware rendering, which is enough for this use. Well, it works for me now, i.e. I can work now on my laptop again. Before it was so slow when selecting vertices or even in the file browser that it prevented me from using blender (but it lead me to try other free modeling software like Wings or Moray, which was quite interesting and insightful).
Hm… please don’t take my comments in spite of linux above not as rant against it. If a switch to linux would solve driver problems, then I would switch. Hm2… if a switch to Windows Vista with it’s different graphics architecture would solve my problems then I would even switch to that.
linux will not solve the ati driver problem, ATI driver on linux is even worse from what i heard.
Still…I find the whole ATI bug quite amusing, since I’ve owned a radeon 9600 and a 9700 and never had any slow-down problems with them using the official ATI driver (catalyst 6.x)… Maybe only the ATI IGPs are affected?
Bold inserted for emphasis. I’ve run Ubuntu 6.10 on my laptop. After installing the correct up to date driver, Blender ran smooth and faster than it does in Windows - even with this file.
I once had a ATI 9200 SE, it didn’t have the slowdown issue either, I’ll agree that this is a strange bug.
remember, the ATI slow down isn’t just because ATI hardware naturally performs bad with Blender, it’s collection of deep-nested, nasty software bugs as a result of incompetent software engineers at ati and Blender’s rather ancient way of calling some OGL functions. Because the slow down are in software, it’s hard to reproduce and is a hit and miss for many people. If linux runs it better, great. Then use Linux.
again, i’ve used many ATI cards and never seen this problem in Windows XP nor Linux, forcing a generic GDI driver is way too radical for my liking, for all you who is having troubles with ATI, have you tried just installing the latest ‘official’ display driver? manually?
Hi everybody
I have a laptop with IGP 200m, Ubuntu 6.10, ati driver 8.35.5.
fgl_glxgears show 1184 frames in 5.0 seconds = 236.800 FPS
Blender works fast in 3d viewport, but when I’m trying to Unwrap UVs it’s very slowdown in UV/Image Editor.
I think the common proposed solution of turning town the hardware acceleration is much more radical. It effects everything on Windows. This extra driver doesn’t hurt any other program, aside from the much better performance given.
With this driver I can animate and sculpt on my laptop. Something I definitely cannot do using the ‘official’ thing because I’d literally have to wait for seconds (!) after moving between frames, dragging around a bone or sculpting some detail.
Yes, tried the latest official driver. No, doesn’t work.
Heh, earlier I tried some vista driver dlls, they were pretty bad in xp. I don’t know for sure, but Vista might not have the same problem.
I installed Ubuntu 7.04 last night. Blender was about as slow as it is with this dll when you use the 2D only ati driver. I’m guessing that means these dlls only accelerate OpenGL in 2D. So yeah, it is emulation, if only partial.
Of course, after going here and doing the ‘Method 2’ installation of fglrx, it ran much faster and with no slowdown. Laptop users, particularly 200/200M/1100, if you install Ubuntu you are going to want to do Method 2. Method 1 installs an old driver that doesn’t support our chipsets ,I know because I did this a couple of months ago with 6.10.
It’s still a pain in the ass to do though, so I’ll respect your decision if you decide not to.
