VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed May 05 2004 - 16:46:01 CDT

Hi,
  I thought I'd write a followup to the previous VMD-L postings about weird
problems with the recent crop of ATI drivers on Linux (versions 3.7.x..).

Testing VMD with ATI's 3.7.6 drivers (released in March 2004) reveals
they have various bugs. Some of bugs are new (vs 3.2.x anyway) and some
of which match bugs I've seen before.

For reference/comparison, our ATI test system is an:
  AMD Athlon 1333, with an ATI FireGL X1-128 video board
  Running RedHat 9, with Linux kernel 2.4.20-8

  - Maximizing the graphics window causes X to get very slow/hang and
    yields a blank black window, and/or crashes VMD. This is certainly a
    bug in the ATI drivers since the problem doesn't occur on any other cards.

  - The "snapshot" rendering method produces corrupt output regardless
    whether antialiasing or other features are enabled within VMD.
    I believe this is also a graphics driver bug, the problem didn't occur
    with older revisions of the ATI drivers, i.e. 3.2.x as I recall.

  - Stereo support still seems very buggy, as I get visible display
    corruption regardless of whether VMD is even running, random parts
    of the display contain "garbage" as I run/move standard X-windows
    apps like 'xterm'. When VMD starts, it does not detect stereo from
    the OpenGL driver anyway, so it is unusable presently. This would also
    seem to be a bug in the driver.

I tried various combinations of settings with the ATI 'fglrxconfig'
utility but I was unable to come up with any combination that cured
the problems listed above thus far. One good thing about the new ATI
drivers is that some old bugs I had seen where geometry was actually
drawn incorrectly (or not drawn at all for that matter) have been fixed.
If anyone has solutions for the 3 problems I list above, let me know.
I plan to report the bugs to ATI (again) if I don't find a solution shortly.

I recommend that anyone else that finds bugs in the ATI Linux drivers
report them on their Linux drivers feedback form:
  http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/index.asp

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078