2008-01-31 14:32:52
New Video Card Screws Up OpenGL
My Dell E510 came with an ATI X600 video card, which was not the greatest. It had 128MB of RAM, but the killer was the slow clock speed and slow memory speed. After I installed the new Compiz Fusion and turned on a lot of the desktop effects, the X600 couldn't take much more. If I tried to play a video using MPlayer in fullscreen mode, the audio would play, but the video would run at like .25 frames per second. That's right, less than 1 frame per second. It was then that I decided to get a new video card.I did some searching and decided I was going to get a Radeon HD 2600XT. It's not the newest, but it offers 256MB of RAM and an 800MHz clock speed. That will run anything I need to quite quickly.
The card arrived yesterday and as soon as I got home from teaching, I put it in, compiled the newest Catalyst drivers, and booted the machine. Everything came up fine. I was happy at this point that nothing broke. My usual luck is that everything breaks. Anyway, I downloaded the newest Tekzilla Daily in HD and started MPlayer in fullscreen mode. This is where my luck kicked back in. Check out the video I took on my phone.
You see those black bars? Those are actually flickering on the screen at a seizure inducing rate. My phone can only film at 15 frames per second, so you're not seeing the super fast flickering. But that's not the point. What is going on? This happens with any application that uses OpenGL. I ran glxgears in a 1920x1200 window and got a consistent 320 frames per second, so the card can definitely handle the processing. Any ideas?
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