   OpenGL ATI driver problems?
  HelloI'm interested to know what driver problems people have run into using ATI cards.  I'm currently experiencing crashes and drastic slowdown on my machine when using either an X1650, a 9800 pro, or a 9550.  All AGP cards.  It runs fine on my colleagues Nvidia card, and it has run on a Win2K machine with a 9800, and on a Mac running virtual XP (software rendering mode). It will crash when I try and use FBO's and pBuffers, and doesn't work in software only as there are no available Pixel Formats.  It will run really slowly (8-25 sec per frame) in a hardware accelerated mode that uses offscreen buffers as render targets.Our software runs on some legacy hardware, which is why we're wanting it to support software only mode.I personally think it's related to threading, our app is highly multithreaded, and I think my PC may be a bit naff.  I'm also waiting for another machine with a PCIe slot to test that.Anyone else have any headaches similar to this?   
Quote:Original post by theZapperAnyone else have any headaches similar to this?Nooo, absolutely not ! Working with ATIs excellent OpenGL drivers and their highly competent and uber-reactive dev support team has always been a pleasure ! I have never *ever* felt the urge to punch them hard in the stomach, stab them in the face, and finally ram them a silver stake through the heart. I swear !*cough*...Anyway, here's a very condensed list of some of the major issues we had with this, uhm, thing they call OGL driver:* Multiple context handling (including multithreading) is completely broken - it will leak memory, run into race conditions every five seconds and crash sporadically.* Reading back from a depth buffer returns random values* gl_FragCoords.z returns bogus values* MRT 'support' is an abomination* FBOs crash if not initialized and used according to a *very* specific and cryptic command sequence* You can't attach stencil buffers to an FBO due to lacking packed depth stencil support (apparently fixed in their Vista driver)* 24bit depth textures are not supported, which will break havoc on any 3D compositing shader that relies on the depth resolution of FBO and framebuffer to match.* Floating point textures open another can of worms (weird performance behaviour, unsupported filter and blending modes, etc)* half_float is supported for textures, but neither as a data source format, nor in shaders. Go figure.* glTexEnvfv(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_COLOR, ...) used to be broken. Might be fixed now, I don't know since we dropped FFP support. But it probably still doesn't work.* The GLSL compiler sporadically crashes on complex shaders with a lot of loop unrolling* Rendering into a cubemap side with borders using an FBO doesn't work (important for seamless cubemaps).* texture2DLod is not supported in a fragment shader (although it should be according to the latest GLSL specs)* NPT texture support is incompleteI could go on for ages.We have recently hired a guy whose only responsability is to find workarounds for ATIs driver bugs. It's a full time job, and I don't expect him to lose his job anytime soon...[Edited by - Yann L on September 14, 2007 5:20:54 PM];  Oh darn, Yann L beat me to the soapbox :)Basically, everything he said.  I had the most problems with buggy FBO support.  Unfortunately, that experience has turned me off to OpenGL for a while simply due to the horrendous ATI support.  It has nothing to do with OpenGL itself, I just don't feel like worrying about whether something is going to crash randomly on an ATI card!   ;Quote:It will crash when I try and use FBO's and pBuffersNope, never happened to me.Run your GL stuff from a single thread. Don't make multiple GL windows.Render to float textures have given me weird behavior.Some GLSL code has caused crashes but that was mostly a problem 2 years ago.It's not so bad. Not like Intel, SiS and other not gaming crap.texture2DLod is vs only, but there is another ATI extension for LOD support who's documentation doesn't exist. GL_ATI_shader_texture_lod   ;  Thanks guys, that's interesting to know.I read the other thread Zipster pointed to and Yann mentions "Access violation in atioglxx.dll", I was getting that a lot too.  I think on glTexSubImage2D so I thought it might be using a pointer to dodgey memory or an un allocated texture.  I've not had a chance to debug it yet though as I've had so many other problems to deal with.Maybe we should hire an OpenGL Bug Fixer Guy too...   