Hey all,
My laptop has an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 and openSUSE 11 installed. Also the latest ATI driver from the repo. That would be 8.52.3
Two ATI drivers ago something got screwed up. When I launch a 3d app the picture splits in two and is blocked making it impossible to do anything other then hitting ESC. My sister has a desktop with ATI and openSUSE 11 and the same problem. I have two desktop machines with nVidia and openSUSE 11 and they don’t have this problem.
Today I, again realized that waiting for ATI to release the newer drivers in the repo is futile. I linked two pictures, perhaps someone has seen it before.
Screenie 1
Screenie 2
When I make a screenie with prtscrn the picture is normal so that’s also weird 
Thanks,
Rico
Have you tried running sax2? Maybe even logging out first and running it from the konsole? It should reconfigure your screen settings.
No actually… I’m used to sax from suse 10. When ever I used sax back then it always choose for the opensource driver and settings that didn’t support compiz. So this time I actually didn’t gave sax any chance… I’ll try it tnx.
Ok, I did that. It didn’t work.
I’ve got an ATI Radeon X1200 myself and have never seen a similar symptom. My Catalyst driver is v8.49.7, but I don’t use Compiz. Maybe you could try enabling vertical refresh and disabling Catalyst A.I. in the Catalyst Control Center (on the “More Settings” page); but I’m sure you already tried that… Other than that… Maybe you could revert to the official repository and load the older driver (I think mine is the default; you obviously load the newest versions from some other place, maybe directly from ATI?). I don’t do that. I simply have the ATI repository enabled, but the actual updates are done by SuSE’s regular updates, I never download any drivers manually…
Best of luck!
Or… Could it be that only that 3D program has some corrupted/wrong/inappropriate settings? Does this happen to all 3D apps?
The above didn’t work either. I dont download the drivers myself mainly because if I build that driver it fails to install correctly. So I use the ATI repo. But that one is 2 versions behind now (again).
GLXGears run ok. Could i try more?
It could be that your app’s files and/or settings just got corrupted, you know. I’d really try more 3D apps. There are many OpenGL Open-Source games that can be downloaded from Gamer’s Hell or from Linux Game Tome.
Ok tnx. I didn’t know those site. Or that there were many more Linux games for that matter. I’ll try some. Thanks for your trouble so far.
Update. It’s definitely a bug in the Ati driver. See this post: wine.game.ati - openSUSE Forums and this picture: http://ati.cchtml.com/attachment.cgi?id=609
I’d definitely downgrade the Ati driver to a previous version if at all possible. Or wait for a new one…
Oh darn… Well, downgrading can’t be done from the repo. If I download and build the driver myself it gives me a white screen when I log on. So I’ll just have to wait. It’s just, that ATI repo is 2 versions behind now. Why won’t someone just update that repo when a new driver comes? I’m getting so tired of all this ATI crap for the last couple of years. And why didn’t they buy me a laptop with nVidia? 
I’ll just have to wait for the new driver then. Thank you m8!
Couldn’t agree more. The next laptop (or desktop, for that matter) I buy will have to be from the Linux Certified Hardware List and will have to come with no OS preinstalled. Cheers;)
There is this label on the dutch HP site somewhere that says this line of laptops is Novell Linux Certified or something like that. Well, everything works. It’s ATI messing up.
Hey Josip, you do know that there are several dependencies that need to be installed before the ATI installer will work correctly? No?
I think if you can get the installer to work, that’s your best solution because the ATI site has all the older versions available and so if one version does not work, there are several others you can try. When you use the repos you’re stuck with whatever the current version is unless you save copies of the old driver by downloading it manually.
Also, ATI just released a new version of the its installer / driver on the 15th, but if you want to try it, you have to use the installer.
ATI Catalyst™ 8.10 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver
Also, when you run the installer you have a choice between having it build a custom driver for your kernel, or it can generate an RPM version of the driver as well. So if one method does not work, you can try the other.
I used to complain a lot about ATI drivers, but the last few have been decent, IMHO and they have come a long way. Nvidia has a slight edge, but Nvidia drivers have a few bugs as well.
