Inspiron 600m video and idTech 3 games.

English Hardware
1

My video card is a Mobility Radeon 9000 w/64mb of vram.

I can’t get a single quake 3 based game to display properly on it. Textures keep popping in and out all over the place on all sorts of 3d surfaces->like on random surfaces, random textures, not the ones that are supposed to be there, but ones that have been loaded up for the map. It happens with every single game powered by the idTech 3 engine, open-source builds and otherwise.

Here’s what I know:
I force-swapped my Inspiron 600m’s BIOS for the Latitude D600 to work with the Dell d-dock. The motherboards are identical except for the dedicated vram only being available at 32mb on the D600.<-my D600 bios sees the full 64mb though.

My hardware is aging. ATI’s proprietary driver does not support 11.2’s kernel.

Messing with some of the game’s “cvars” for texture quality and gl-extensions seems to help but the problem never goes away fully.

I’ve got the x.org/mesa 3d drivers installed, updated to the latest versions.
When I check the settings, “direct rendering” is enabled. So I know it’s using my hardware and not the cpu.

I’ve been in and out of Sax2, edited my xorg.conf way too many times to count. <-following http://en.opensuse.org/radeon/. I also read the posts about video drivers in the forum.

My xorg.conf is now stock since I had to go failsafe a couple of times after blackscreens.

My xorg.conf.

Section "Device"
  BoardName    "RV250 Lf"
  Driver       "radeon"
  Identifier   "Device[0]"
  Option       "monitor-LVDS" "Monitor[0]"
  VendorName   "ATI"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
    Group      "video"
    Mode       0660
EndSection

Does anybody know of anything I could be missing in my xorg.conf, or anywhere else that’s causing these problems?

It’s not that big of a deal if a solution doesn’t exist. My hardware is getting old and actively playing the game isn’t a priority. I’m building a game mod and using this soon-to-be museum piece of a laptop to create and debug linux builds for it->for which it gets the job done.

Just putting this out there to see if theres something I haven’t tried. If it’s an upstream issue at x.org or mesa3d I’m fine with just dealing with it.

Any help is very appreciated. Cheers!

2

I think you’ve answere your question yourself. The radeon driver only provides limited acceleration performance, so will not cut it as far as many games go. My old ATI X300 graphics chipset id in the same boat (so for now I’ve stayed with openSUSE 11 with the proprietary fglrx driver).

3

That’s what I thought/figured…oh well, guess I’ll grin and bear it. Gotta remind myself to debug on teeny-tiny maps where it doesnt happen as often.