How much difference does updating the videocard driver make (assuming that Blender is working “ok” with the current drivers)? For example, is it likely to speed up rendering, to make the .avi files less jerky? Any info about the general function of the videocard relative to Blender would be helpful.
I’ve been using drivers for my ATI 8500 All-In-Wonder (on Win XP) that are about a year old (but they are not an early version of the drivers). Blender 2.27 works pretty good with this. My only problems have been slightly jerky .avi files and 2.28 crashed on rendering. Is a driver update likely to improve these problems? I have the OpenGL settings on the card set to Optimize Performance (vs Quality) and Convert32to16bit (although turning of 32to16 convert doesn’t appear to affect rendering speed).
I wouldn’t bother you with this question except sometimes videocard driver updating does cause problems too, and ATI recommends not updating the drivers unless you have a problem. Thanks for your patience and help.
I have Radeon 8500 basic model, and I have updated to newest driver as soon as possible,… I had one problem with previous drivers,(crash on exit) but new one works perfectly (note, my use of blender is little limited as I’m blender newbie).
As for opengl driver settings, you can keep them maxed as 8500 is a pretty fast card for this kind of work. Antialias (smoothvision) settings should be disabled as from what I have heard it can mess blender gui…
Never
possible
Try rendering from command line, if it does not crashe then video drivers are innocent.
Stefano
Thanks!
You should update when the newer drivers are less crap.
Martin
Try it with the new drivers, if they cause problems winXP has a “driver rollback” feature
I also us an ATI, an older version of the AiW, and it’s drivers are the weak link on my machine, but AVI’s always play fine for me using the ATI file player, but less good with 3rd party players.