Intel 915GM/GMS/910L and GoogleEarth
 

A Dell Insiron 6000, Slackware 12.2, glxinfo reports "direct rendering: Yes" and GoogleEarth version 5.0.11337.1958 (that's the beta; from GoogleEarth) renders like a 3-legged dog with a busted tail -- frame by frame instead of smooth.

glxgears reports around 4450 frames in 5.0 seconds, about 890 FPS.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf has the "DRI" section at the end with Mode 0666 (and, apparently the right drivers loaded given glxgears running as above).

Is there a magic trick for the 915GM chip set for smooth, fast rendering of GoogleEarth? Been though as many threads as I can find, but none seem deal with the 915 family and I was just wondering.

890 fps _is_ crap. My money would go on the three legged dog :-). I am running a nvidia MX-440 from the last millenium which uses the legacy NV drivers and _that_ reports 2250 fps in glxgears. Change

1. Your video card if at all possible - It's a piece of <expletive deleted>. All those m$ emails that were made public due to some court case revealed that m$ badly wanted the Intel 915 off motherboards.

2. Your version of Google-earth. With an old video card like that, try to drop back to 4.2.

Watch the libraries. I have issues because GE supplies it's own libs (inc X video libs, but nvidia likes to have _it's_ own proprietary version. It's a minefield.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH might have to be cleverly set in the ge startup script

All good ideas, but... the graphics parts and pieces are soldered in place, thus a tiny bit difficult to, you know, replace with something more highfalutin.

Ah, well, ever onward and downward methinks.

My "Intel Corporation 82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics Controller" renders like a dog without any legs at all with the latest Google Earth versions on my 4GB Core2-Duo 3GHz machine (but hey, it's a server, I don't need fancy graphics).

On the other hand, on a much older machine (single core 2GHz, 1GB) the same version of Google Earth runs very well on an old ATI Radeon 9200 card.

I don't know anything about Dell computers (is it a notebook?), but check if it accepts a better video card, any Geforce 5200 or better will give you satisfactory results.
If not, you might be out of luck for Google Earth

Yeah, it's a laptop and no version of GoogleEarth has ever rendered worth a hoot on it (in Linux -- all Slackware). Odd thing is it's a dual-boot with XP and, blasted thing, it works all right with XP (of course) so I was kind of hoping that there might be some thing that just maybe might do a trick.

The other box (also a Dell but with an ATI Radeon) goes speedy-fast and smooth as a baby's... uh, hiney.

Oh, well.

It might just be a driver issue. I have to use proprietary drivers and ignore notices that proprietary software taints my kernel :-).

http://intellinuxgraphics.org/download.html

I just don't know if they're in slackware as standard.

search on googlearthspeedfix and see if that can help you. i couldn't get it to work in ge5 tho.

also, turning off the atmosphere can cure slowness in some cases.

The proprietary drivers look like fun -- think I'll give those a look-see.

Thanks

The intel drivers are all open source now I believe.