Adventures in shitty computing

[Carl Winslow]

prepare for a tl;dr run-through of the most mind-boggling PC issue of all time.

I've gotten myself a new video card (HD4670) to replace my X1600 which is obviously on it's deathbed. Everything seems okay, installed the drivers and it's running things okay.

That is, until i get to a program running OpenGL. all OGL progams I've checked have almost zero functionality. one program which had general logs for startup returned a huge chunk of errors basically saying NONE of the rendering functions worked. One of the few programs that did work ran at about 1 frame every 3 seconds, and one other program reverted immediately to software mode when it started up.

Now, I've dealt with driver issues before. I decided to go through, uninstall them, reinstall, try again with an older driver, then next oldest, and so on until the card wasn't recognized by the drivers anymore.

Unfortunately it looks to be a problem systemic to certain types of ATI cards (specifically the last two or so generations) and OpenGL programs. It looks like for whatever reason ATI's cards aren't using (or maybe not allocating any) any of the onboard video memory so the GPU is waiting for the memory to come off the hard-drive or maybe the system RAM. So its essentially just sitting all the time waiting for information to try to do stuff with versus the card storing shit in its own memory.

All in all, ATI is terrible for OpenGL period though, so I was dumb for getting a card from them in the first place, and sending in my UPC code for the mail-in rebate. PURE STUPIDITY on my part, and no other thing to blame that for.

So, I go about finding ways to diagnose just what is happening in this mess.

Caps viewer returns this. Now, for those not in the know, we are in a generation currently where OpenGL is at 3.1 base functionality. having XP think it's at a generic driver with 1.1 functionality, a driver which has only been useful when Windows 95 was the big thing, is a pretty huge problem.

After all of this, I'm told to try manually installing the driver for ATI OpenGL. This is what I get in said attempt:

If you can't tell what this means, it means that it can indeed work, but Windows has no idea where to put it, and thusly can't even manually install it. that in itself is crazy, and leads me to assume the OS itself is the issue.

Before i can go buying an external HD in order to back my stuff up, (as well as making 3 extra failsafes beforehand) I was told to install a Ubuntu in order to check if this was a definitive hardware issues. this of course went perfectly fine up until 'install drivers' came up. downloading them from ATI's site for Linux drivers went fine. actually installing them turned into a problem, as apparently an administrator user isn't considered a 'super-user' by default.

so, I start going through the authorization process to make my user capable of actually doing stuff. as it turns out that didn't help, so I don't really have a clue what any of that was for.

After a bit of searching, I find that Ubuntu had a driver install utility built in, and even auto-detected my card. it offered an 'open source ATI graphics driver solution', but I figured it should work enough to test for hardware issues.

after installing the 'open source ATI driver solution' thing from the drivers list, I get an out of frequency error on my monitor. I find a fix, and get knocked out of the prompts for $sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg after I finish the keyboard configuration section. attempting to boot to Ubuntu just gives me a confuzzled mess of pixels where my moniter refreshes 3 times then shuts off.

I fucking hate computers.

[Cyber Rat]

I talked to a friend that's more informed when it comes to PC hardware than I am a few days ago, and I think he said that all these new ATI cards don't work properly on WinXP, but do on Vista, so maybe you should try changing the OS? (Yes, I am aware how awful Vista is.) Is it too late for you to give the card back and get an nVidia card?