Why can't my SiS do 3D gaming or play movies?

ashibaka · 03-22-2003, 03:43 PM

lspci thinks my card is:

SiS 6306 3D-AGP
Subsystem: SiS 530,620 GUI Accelerator+3D

This should be good enough for running 3D stuff, right? But when I try to run a 3D game, I get a very, very weird error.

SIS driver: Out of video memory
Fatal errors in sis_dri.so

And when I play a movie using Xvideo, if the movie is too big, there is a big splotch of pink covering the entire right-hand side of the movie. The part that's showing the video flickers and looks rather messed-up.

This is with Thomas Winischhofer's updated SIS driver. Without it, Xvideo didn't work at all, and when I tried to run a 3D game it would run at about 0.01 frames per second.

ashibaka · 03-25-2003, 12:14 AM

Partially Solved

I reread Winischhofer's website, and it turns out he hasn't implemented YV12 support for this particular XV card, so I had to add the "NoYV12" option. For the record, my video card section now looks like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Demonic Video Card"
Driver "sis"
VideoRam 8192
Option "NoYV12" "true"
Option "UseFBDev" "true"
EndSection

As for the "out of video memory" error, I believe it is a similar problem, but I haven't quite figured it out yet.

crashmeister · 03-25-2003, 02:50 AM

I am not sure about this one because I didn't fiddle with it for a long time but you could try to add:
"MaxXFBMem" "12288"
To the device section and append:
"video=sisfb:mem:12288"
To the bootloader.
12288 is for 16mb or more RAM.
Besides of that there are games that will not work with sis - sadly vegastrike was one of them last time I checked.
That has to do with the fact that sis is not supported by opengl and you run into memory mapping problems after a while but then it just crashes.
How mant fps you get with glxgears?

ashibaka · 03-25-2003, 03:13 AM

-_-; That's for sisfb. My SiS card is very old and doesn't work with sisfb.

As for glxgears, it gives me the same "out of video memory" error.

crashmeister · 03-25-2003, 03:49 AM

Sorry bout that.If it is really a 620 DRI isn't supported per Winischhofer and therefore no 3D.
Check under II.Issues/3.x-driver

Electro · 03-25-2003, 04:19 AM

Did you try using Mesa software for 3D rendering. I know its an software 3D render but it should be good enough until SIS supports OpenGL. If LINUX can reconqnize a P4 processor with hyper threading you could get by using Mesa. One thread of the P4 processor can do Mesa and the other thread can do LINUX.

In your BIOS, set AGP aperture to 4 megabytes or to off. Also add the AGP aperture to 4 megabytes or 0 megabytes in your XF86config file. Sometimes the AGP aperture eats up all your memory. I'm not sure but SIS may use certain addresses for video memory. You may need to tell LINUX what addresses to not use.