Horde3D

ATI has completely rewritten the Catalyst OpenGL drivers a few months ago. The good thing is that they are supporting OpenGL 2.1 (instead of just 2.0) now.

But the really bad thing is that the drivers have a plenty of problems which didn't exist before. There are some bugs and performance seems to be really bad.

Here a list of problems we have noticed so far:

• Chicago 0.14 on X1600 with Catalyst 8.1, Windows XP:
  The sample crashes when being started. The problem is related to the Parallel Split Shadow Maps. I found a simple workaround for the fragLighting.glsl shader which is working but the performance is still bad in general. Catalyst 7.10 didn't have these problems and the framerate was more than twice as high as what I get with the new Catalyst 8.1.
  
• Chicago and Knight on HD2600:
  The skinning is not working correctly. See screenshots in this thread:
  http://www.nextgen-engine.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=179&start=15

Hi everybody,

I'm breaking my silence with some good news from ATI

The June Catalyst release is supposed to have a fix for the skinning bug. Thanks to their dev support for taking care of this issue!

That is good news!

Hope they give their Mac drivers get a little TLC as well one of these days. Wireframe combined with GLSL/VBO confirmed not working on a an ATI Radeon HD 2400 (iMac) as well.

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

ATI Driver is still buggy and it seems nothing has changed so far with the newest version

Adapter: ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro
Catalyst Version: 8.5
OpenGL-Driver-Version: 6.14.10.7537
OpenGL version: 2.1.7537 Release

Keep on hoping for the next version

p.s. why is the helmet rendered correctly but not the body?

Regards Thomas

The helmet is a separate mesh from the body, and only skinned meshes are affected by the bug.

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

First I thought the 8.5 driver was the announced bug fixed version, but as Nicolas told me, the June version will be the one that should contain the fix. And apparently the minor number of the version represents the month, so the june version should be 8.6

So using the standard shader and software skinning could be a workaround!

send the demo to ati support with the system info

Already done, that's why we got the response that it should be fixed in the June version of the drivers

sorry I should have read the posts

So Catalyst 8.6 has been released! Has anybody with an ATI card that had the problems tested it already?
[edit] I tested it on a 780g chipset and it still shows the problem. Time to write to the ATI support again!

I still have the problem with the new driver

Adapter: ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro
Catalyst Version: 8.6
OpenGL-Driver-Version: 6.14.10.7659
OpenGL version: 2.1.7659 Release

Regards Thomas

I also have this problem under an ATI card. These two screenshots were taken under Catalyst 8.6 on a Radeon HD 2400 Pro (Windows XP Pro 32 bit). Going into wireframe mode reveals that the meshes are having their triangles drawn, but the shaders on animated objects are completely missing. Attached are screenshots of this behavior.

On driver 173.14 on an Nvidia Geforce 6800 Ultra (Windows XP Pro 32 bit), everything appears correctly, including the missing shaders.

just strange, it works fine on my x1600 pro(winXP pro 32, also catalyst 8.6)
(unrelated, your windows looks like vista)
good gpu, bad drivers. I wonder how they do it...

We had the same problems here at our lab, If I remember correctly we got an X1600 that always worked fine. I recently got a 780G onboard graphics card that showed the problem descriped above. But I didn't have the time to check if there may be some workarounds.