Open GL issues
 

:cry:
My previous system was an AMD K6-500, 128mb ram, Gigabyte motherboard. I was running first Mandrake 8.1 and later 9.0. My original display card was a Diamond Steath multimedia with S3 Virge chipset, PCI slot. Open GL stuff would not run, would pretend to load, then just disappear from the K-Desk taskbar. I figured my card just did not have the poop to run Open GL.

I then got a 16mb Aopen AGP with an Nvidia Vanta LT chipset which Mandrake read as being a Riva TNT card. Did a reinstall. Everything went fine until time to load the X-server. The screen started blinking on and off and no X-server/K-desk. The OS would try to make it work for a bit, then start blinking again. I finally gave up and thought I would try another card. I got a cheap ATI Rage 128 16mb PCI card.

No screen blinking, but also no open GL.

I upgraded to Mandrake 9.0, hoping that would solve the problem. Still no open GL and the ATI card now made the screen blink. Switched to the AOpen AGP card and now everything worked as before, but still no open GL. Or more accuarately SPOTTY open GL. The game Chromium would sometimes work for apparently no reason at all. I was running X v 3.something with experitmental hardware accel. 4.something would work the open GL, but very slooooooowly. and Tuxracer would not work at all. The 3. would at least load some of the Open GL stuff, but it would either be unbelievably slow or would just lock up. In the case of Tuxracer, the screen would be wavy along the edge.

I got a new computer (new to me, anyway), Sony Vaio P3-800 with intel 810 integrated AGP on the motherboard. Open GL worked like a champ, later I put in an ATI PCI All-in-wonder 32mb RAGE 128 PRO, everything still worked just fine. Was my problem that I did not have a pentium processor? Was it lack of memory on either the motherboard or the display adaptor? What? I am running dual boot on my present sytem (Win ME and Mandrake 9.0), I would perhaps like to network with my old system and maybe have a go at trying out some of the networked games like Bzflag, but if I do not have a prayer of getting Open GL to work on the old system, then it isn't worth it. Anybody out there got an answer to my conundrum?