Windows OpenGL being tempramental

December 6, 2008 9:47 PM

Why have some of my OpenGL applications stopped working in Windows?

I got a new graphics card a few weeks ago - an ASUS EAH3450. After installation, everything was working perfectly. Now, a select set of applications that use OpenGL crash immediately on startup.

Some OpenGL applications that still work:

Sauerbraten
GLExcess Benchmark
Lightsmark Benchmark
OpenGL Extensions Viewer

Some OpenGL applications that don't:

Google SketchUp 7
Google Earth (OpenGL Mode)
Unigine Tropics Demo
Moray Modeller

One of these applications throws up a useful looking error:

GL_Ext_Framebuffer_blit not supported.

But it worked originally...

OpenGL Extensions viewer lists my OpenGL version as 2.1. What could be going wrong - I assume some programs are trying to use the software renderer when they shouldn't?

As far as I can tell, I may have done one of two things to cause the problem.

1. Fiddle with the driver settings in the ASUS Catalyst control center. But I've now set these all back to "Default" and the problem persists.
2. Installed the old game "American McGee's Alice" - as far as I can recall, the problems started happening after I installed this. I've now uninstalled it and the problem persists.

I've also reinstalled the graphics card's drivers, to no avail.

Any tips on how I can diagnose the problem, and figure out what's going wrong?

posted by Jimbob to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Oh. Vista Home 32bit, by the way.
posted by Jimbob at 9:48 PM on December 6, 2008

It's not clear to me that you're using the latest drivers from the chipset manufacturer, as opposed to ASUS. You should always do this when possible. They are here.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 8:58 AM on December 7, 2008

The latest ASUS drivers are from January, the latest ATI drivers are from November. To be extra thorough you may wish to uninstall the ASUS drivers first.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 9:01 AM on December 7, 2008

In my very limited experience, ATI cards didn't do GL as well as NVidia cards. I play a lot of City of Heroes which is GL based. I switched from an NVidia to an ATI cards. Lots of graphics candy was no longer available and lots of effects had random/wrong colors. It looked terrible. I returned the card and switched back to an NVidia.
posted by chairface at 1:16 PM on December 7, 2008

Well, I was confused about the latest drivers. The ones that came with my card were dated November 2008...but searching for drivers online, I kept finding the January ones, so I didn't want to install them, thinking I'd be going backwards, when the drivers that came with the card did work originally. According to the Device Manager, I have the "November" drivers installed.

Another symptom - the error message I get, regarding the unsupported extension, also says "Unknown GPU".
posted by Jimbob at 2:59 PM on December 7, 2008