Rage Mobility Chipset on laptop And OpenGL

Hey all,

We have developped an application that use OpenGL in a window. Its kind of a CAD Program. The thing is that some of our client use laptop and the one that use the Rage Pro Mobility Chipset from ATI, they don’t see nothing in the OpenGL window !! How is this possible ? I know the rage pro is not the best for acceleration but they should at least see something in the window. What can cause this ? Bad driver from the manufacturer ? (One use a Micron and the other a Gateway)

Any idea or help would be appreciated !

Charles

OpenGL is made to be able to, independant of drivers and platform, be able to draw (more or less) the same picture out of the same code. So if your program works on one computer, it should do the same on other computers too, including laptops.

What you are saying makes me think of two things. Bad drivers (you mentioned it too), or the use of an extension that is supported on all tested platforms, but not on the laptops. To solve the second problem, you must make sure you are not using extensions, or write another routing that does the same thing, but not using extensions, that are called instead if the system does not has this extension.

And yeah, the Mobility chip is kinda crappy. Saw a test where five platforms was compared. Three laptops with mobility chip, and one stationary with TNT, and a stationary with MS’s software drivers (this computer was a PII 300MHz on a TNT, but without drivers). The test was kinds funny to watch. MS’s softwaredriver was better that all laptops, in ALL tests! Don’t remember specifications on the laptops, but they was way faster that 300MHz

I have an Inspiron 3700 with Rage Mobility and have had endless trouble with opengl on Windows98SE. Crappy drivers is right.
Some pointers:
-Ati’s opengl ICD only works in 16bpp mode.
-Get the latest video drivers from your laptop supplier.

I suspect ati’s ICD is not as ‘full’ as it should be (claims to be version 1.1), namely Vectorarrays seem to cause problems, line rendering incorrect with depth testing enabled.

You should look at rageunderground.com and rage3d.com for gamer orientated news on ati.

With all the time I’ve wasted on this stuff I ask the question – shouldn’t there be some quality standard that IHVs meet before releasing so called ‘production’ software. I feel like a paying beta tester.

If I remember correctly, the Rage Mobility is Rage Pro-based, and the thing that bugs me the most about that chipset is that it can’t alpha blend correctly. =b

Got problems with ATI chips too. Too many customers are using it sigh. The only way I could stop getting NT a blue screen is to install older drivers which doesn’t support OpenGL hardware accelleration.

Kilam.

I have similair problems with ATI chips (Rage Pro, Rage Pro LT). We are making CAD like applications too.
I have following problems:

  1. We use splitter windows with different OpneGL views inside. Randomly some of them stay black.
  2. Section buffer delivers wrong z-Values.

Month ago I sended a sample application. They’ve told me, they are working on it…

By the way:
With Matrox G400 there are other problems…

Torsten

ACER737 / RAGE MOBILITY = only 16-bit color depth and crashing when trying handling multiple OpenGL rendering contexts per process (if not a bug in glColorMask())

I also have problems with ATI and multiple rendering contexts. Same code works perfectly on a geforce2? On ati card, some rc’s display nothing or the app crashes.