OpenGL crashes

[DanielPharos]

Well, I've discovered a bug, but not in QuArK. ATi's OpenGL driver appears to be bugged: if you enter any OpenGL fullscreen app when any other OpenGL apps are running, it screws up. Try this:
Download, install and run Realtech's OpenGL Viewer from here
Run it, and start the rendering tests.
While these are running, ALT-TAB out, and start Quake II or Quake III. Go in-game. Now either Quake is corrupted, or the Realtech tests are. Nice going ATi!

Sometimes, it'll trigger a VPU recovery (meaning the driver crashed)!

This bug also occures with QuArK. Since this feels, looks and smells like a driver bug, there's nothing I can do about it. So if you also experience this, please make a ticket about it on ATi's website: http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894

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Just for reference, here's my GameDev topic about this: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=510208

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The latest Intel drivers for the Intel Extreme 2 chipset crash hard, causing Windows (XP) to revert to safe VGA on the fly! (I personally didn't know Windows would/could do that!). The latest non-bloat NVIDIA drivers (pre-1xx) for a Geforce FX 5200 handle everything perfectly. So only NVIDIA card will run QuArK's OpenGL smoothly.


So, what does this mean? I need to get the DirectX going, since that will work! But that won't be before the next release (6.6.0 Beta 2), so everybody will just have to hang in there and either:
1) Use the Software renderer.
2) Close ALL OpenGL windows in QuArK before starting the game, but that might not help.

[Hellkeeper]

Now this is weird.

I'm using ATI's 9.1 drivers, with my HD4870, and never experienced it.
I've been unable to reproduce it. No matter how many OpenGL apps I open, even fullscreen, it doesn't mess things up.
Since you're using XP and I'm using Vista, I wonder if the problem can be related to this.
Also, on startup, QuArK, like any fullscreen OpenGL software, disable the desktop Direct3D effects, and Vista falls back to the basic blue theme instead of Aero.

[DanielPharos]

Oh, I didn't remember to post the outcome...

I was testing on a Radeon 9800 Pro. I tested in on a WinXP with a Geforce FX5200 also, and it ran fine. I was also able to test the same thing on a 2x HD2900XT crossfire setup, and didn't experience the problem either. At the moment I told ATi this in my support ticket (I should have known better!), they responded, and I quote:

Newer drivers really do not work well for the older cards because the feature set is different.

So, if you're experiencing this problem, try older drivers. In ATi's case, It works with the 7.11 driver, but breaks with 7.12. (I think that's when they upgraded their entire OpenGL driver.) Apparently supporting supposedly supported devices is too much to ask from ATi (/AMD).

But yeah, you're right Hellkeeper. It appears this is entirely a driver<-->hardware issue, and has nothing to do with QuArK (or Windows) specifically.