T400 ATi Driver, Vista64, Visual Studio 2005/2008 + OpenGL = Application hangs

[timebits]

Well, the thread title sums it up pretty concisely.

I develop OpenGL Apps in C++ on my Lenovo T400. My OS is Windows Vista 64 and I use Switchable Graphics. When using ATI Graphics my apps hang since i installed the lastest ATI Driver for the T400 (Release: 2009-04-28) when (and only when) starting the applications in the debugger. When starting the apps directly (either compiled for Debug or Release targets, both 32-bit) however, they work (!).

As far i can tell it hangs when it tries swapping the buffers (for double buffering). 

This happens both in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. When will there be a fixed driver?

[timebits]

I believe this is the same problem:

http://forums.amd.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=203&threadid=109589

Could you bring out a driver based on Catalyst 9.5?

[timebits]

Sorry for self-replying yet again

Does anyone know who I should contact to get this fixed? This is really annoying since this is the only driver supporting OpenGL 3.0!

[zilla]

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timebits wrote:

This is really annoying since this is the only driver supporting OpenGL 3.0!

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The current Lenovo driver is Catalyst 8.12 based (8.56 driver release). I thought OpenGL 3.0 support was only added in Catalyst 9.1 (8.57 driver)?

The next Lenovo driver will be Catalyst 9.3 based (8.59 driver.) It was supposed to have shipped by the end of April but they had problems so decided to ship the Catalyst 8.12 based driver instead (the driver we had before 4/28 was really old -- based on Catalyst 8.8 -- 8.52 driver)

For the whole saga of Lenovo/ATI's tardiness in making switchable graphics work see this thread.

If you as a developer are dependent on having uptodate functionality in your graphics driver, you should consider modding the drivers you can download from the ATI site. All the links here are for Vista 32 but I am sure you can find the corresponding Vista 64 links. This means giving up on switchable graphics and setting discrete graphics (and os autodetect off) in bios.

Starting Catalyst 9.4 (8.60 driver) ATI included switchable graphics in the drivers downloadable from their site. But unless you want to waste a lot of time -- stay with discrete graphics in bios.

Btw I tried the modded Catalyst 9.4 (8.60 driver) on my Vista 32 T500 but had terrible performance in OpenGL (not 3.0) so went back to my modded Catalyst 9.1 (8.57 driver*) which I have good performance with.

Message Edited by zilla on 2009-05-20 10:40 AM