Wednesday, September 13, 2006

ATI OpenGL 2.0 implementation incomplete..hello NVidia!

Sad to say, but all you ATI lovers (like I USED to be) are in for a rude surprise with ATIs' "OpenGL2.0" Linux driver implementation. After 1 1/2 days of finally getting my ATI All in Wonder 9800 Pro to actually use Direct Rendering and OpenGL2.0 and see it working well (5000FPS on glxgears), it was very disheartening to find out that ATI had not provided the proper 2.0 hooks for Cinelerra to use. Specifically, programming hooks like glDeleteShader were not implemented. The troubleshooting was quite informative, as I am not an active C programmer.

The solution was typical of today's PC market. If it don't work, buy one that does! So I went to B&H Photo and bought a BFG nVidia GeForce 7600GS, 512MB. Twenty minutes after getting home, the card was in the box, drivers were compiled, installed and working. Fifteen minutes after that, Cinelerra was compiled and I was using OpenGL2.0! Yeehoo!! And at twice the playback speed of what I was getting previously with the ATI card. I will report back on the performance of this card once I actually USE it.

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