Matrox ICD for Parhelia - textures are black, even crashes

Hi,
When I run my opengl engine on Matrox ICD Parhelia the following happens:
Textures are sometimes, not always missing and
these triangles are just black.
The engine crashes when I try to open up the console, which uses texture maps to draw text.

None of this happens on any other hardware I’ve
tried and I have no idea how to solve it. I did mail to matrox but haven’t gotten any answers.

I load compressed DXT1 & 5 textures for the
“world” and uncompressed .tga textures for the console. I also have a system that samples light using readpixels, which does not use texture mapping, and this also comes out “black”. Could this be something related to alpha channels and
alpha colors? I use the texture matrix to offset
uv’s in some of these cases. I have no idea how
to even begin to solve this, I dont have this graphic card myself to do “trial and error” on my own. I must have entered some invalid parameters
that the other drivers just fixed for me.

Hopefully someone here can help me out.

Many thanks
Joakim Sandstrom

I am absolutely sorry to say this but… there is a reason why no major game supports Matrox, and you just discovered it.

Stay away from Matrox. Seriously.

Y.

Ysaneya,
Thank you for your reply.
But I cannot belive the only way forward is to label my engine “not compatible with matrox hardware”!? There must be some way around these problems, even if it means reduced functionality / visual quality.
Would you be able to give me any hint on where these problems are coming from?

Thanks
Joakim Sandstrom

Posting a screenshot might help, but unfortunately i think you’re screwed. Matrox has minimum support for DirectX, but their OpenGL support is extremely low. I’ve seen standard GL 1.1 features (like the stencil buffer) completely buggued on a Parhelia. If standard GL 1.1 functions don’t work, i think this should give you a hint on how “important” Matrox believes OpenGL is.

What happens when you don’t use texture compression at all ?

Y.

Ysaneya,
As I said, I dont have this graphics card myself, it is a client that uses my engine, so I wanted to solve this in theory first before presenting updates that would keep crashing that machine…

But if you are right and even core 1.1 features are problematic - then it is almost annoying to try and solve this. My requirements are 1.3.

Well, unless someone comes forward and paints a brighter picture of Matrox + OpenGL, I’ll leave it with this for now.

Thank you for your help!
Joakim Sandstrom

Yes. On the other hand, all the issues i’ve had with Matrox were when the Parhelia was first released (or a few months after), so they might (or most likely not) have been fixed in the “latest” drivers.

Y.

Originally posted by Sandstrom:
[b]Ysaneya,
Thank you for your reply.
But I cannot belive the only way forward is to label my engine “not compatible with matrox hardware”!? There must be some way around these problems, even if it means reduced functionality / visual quality.
Would you be able to give me any hint on where these problems are coming from?

Thanks
Joakim Sandstrom[/b]
Then I suggest running in software mode. Get Mesa.

Matrox is not interested in 3D. They just release patches to some popular games. They don’t even bother integrating the patches into the drivers.

You COULD try e-mailing Matrox developer support. They have been known to answer e-mails and release fixed drivers, when presented with easy-to-compile, easily-reproducible test cases.

I had to fight with Matrox cards some time ago
and the only solution that worked was replacing
the original “drivers” with SciTech’s GLDirect.
It didn’t fix all but at least some basic
extensions like glVertexPointerEXT etc. where
available and working.
Here is the link.