I have a machine with an ATI 9250 and when i start Bzflag, it always starts up using the GDI generic driver. I know i have hardware acceleration on my computer because I can run commercial games BLAZINGLY FAST. I was wondering if there was a way I could force the ati driver.
BTW: this is my windoze machine, my linux harddisk crashed .
make sure you are using the driver from ATI, not the one from windows update.
many other games use directX, bzflag openGL. The drivers from MS will accelerate directX but not always openGL.
if you are runing the proper driver, then try lowering your resolution, your card may not be able to do hardware accelelration at the size you requested due to ram contraints. I know some of the little 9250s came with low amounts of ram.
Basicly we don't pick what the driver does ( hardware vs. software ) it picks itself.
your card should do hardware, if it says GDI then that means that driver isn't even running and that your using the generic MS openGL implemenation. This is why I feel you do not have the current driver from ATI.
Well first thing I am using catalyst 6.2. My card has 256 mb on chip. I have 512 mb of system. And i know GDI is not even the microsoft driver. And i know i have the latest from ati. I was actually thinking of uninstalling the ati driver and seeing if i get better luck with the Microsoft driver .
I have windows XP. And why would just upgrading from 6.2 to 6.7 help? I have just upgraded and I still get the GDI generic driver. The crappy thing is, my OLD 586 (cyrix 187mhz) with a S3 primary video and 3dfx voodoo 3 is getting slightly better preformance (like 10 fps) at the same quality setting as my pimp dual 600mhz amd athlon and ati radeon 9250. Could somebody please explian y i cant get bzflag to use my 3d acceleration?? This might also help: In SuSELinux the builtin MESA driver didnt work for 3d acceleration and the proprietary ati driver for linux didnt work eigther and the SuSE professionals couldnt figure that out either.
bzflag dosn't choose to use acceleration or not, we simply ask the OS for an openGL context and it retuns us one, acclerated if it can, software if it can't.
so the problem is NOT bzflag. the problem is your OS/driver. There is nothing we can tell you to set in bz to change what your OS/Driver does.
Ok first thing that i want to say is thank you everybody who tried to help me. JeffM2501, you were half right, it was actually my mobo chipset that didnt fully support the card. I figured this out because my proprietary IBM workstation has a proprietary MATROX-only chipset (stupid monopoly) so that way it was a cheaper system. The techies at IBM were suprised i could even get the ati card to even run on my mobo (but i figure it works because there isnt too much of a difference between matrox and ati cards). So i switched to a new mobo i was getting any way. My new mobo is a noname mobo that has 2 pci express x16 slots and 1 agp x8 slot AND 5 pci slots AND 2 isa slots. I think this is actually a server mobo but o well i got it for like 2000 and no problems so far (except for ram timing stuff it wasnt too much of a plug and play board as can be expected from no name brands.) Anyway thanks and I now can run bz @ 1280x1024 with top quality @ 200fps. looks really nice now. Thanks all.
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This might also help: In SuSELinux the builtin MESA driver didnt work for 3d acceleration and the proprietary ati driver for linux didnt work eigther and the SuSE professionals couldnt figure that out either.