ATI Radeon Mobility HD 4500

[michel]

I upgraded to KDE 4.9 and as I wanted to lower CPU overhead, I decided to turn desktop effects off only to find this alarming message under System Settings / Desktop Effects:

Desktop effects are not available on this system due to the following technical issues:

OpenGL compositing (the default) has crashed KWin in the past.
This was most likely due to a driver bug.
If you think that you have meanwhile upgraded to a stable driver,
you can reset this protection but be aware that this might result in an immediate crash!
Alternatively, you might want to use the XRender backend instead.

Pressing this button can crash the desktop

I was wondering about how to find out if my video card is properly installed. Can we use sgfxi under Kubuntu?

Thanks,

Michel


Edit: I pressed the button and nothing happened. I managed to turn the effects off. Does that mean everything is OK?

[benny_fletch]

I am not positive, but yes, I would assume OpenGL is operating correctly.

In my past experience you can test if OpenGL is working by:

- Open KInfoCenter
- Go to "Graphical Information -> OpenGL"

If OpenGL is not loaded correctly this should cause an error, if there is no error then everything should be fine. If you continue to have issues post what video driver you are using, this will help in troubleshooting your problem.

[dmeyer]

Don't let an error like that alarm you. Its possible you just enabled a desktop effect or something that caused Kwin to crash under an odd set of circumstances. I used to get those errors all the time with 11.04 and it never really hurt me or affected me.

[michel]

I have installed the applet "Additional Drivers" from the Kubuntu repositories, it allows you to search for and install proprietary drivers for your non vanilla hardware. It confirmed that I was running the right ATI 3D driver.

Michel