I've been experiencing some glitches in the interface for a while now, mostly input fields and buttons going all white or black and flickering when an update happens in the interface. e.g hovering over a button so it should highlight or scrolling. The only place I've been able to consistently reproduce the bug is in the add-on list and other tabs in User Preferences, but it happens all over the interface. Screenshot1.png shows the glitch.
Another UI glitch (Screenshot2.png) I've found is in the video editor and only appears when i have a sound file cached so you can see the waveform. Not only does it slow down the interface considerably but it also displays what seems to be jumping (when scrolling) displaced polygon lines. If i turn of the caching on the sound file it all works as expected. I wasn't able to test it in the svn build as caching audio files has been disabled. Screenshot3.png gives a more extreme example of this problem, it looks like the way it draws the waveform totally ignores the borders of the strip.
At first i thought it was because of my bad video card but the problem persists even after I've installed a serious workstation card from AMD and i really think that shouldn't happen.
System details:
Debian 6.0 stable 64bit
AMD FirePro v5800 Workstation card with official drivers version fglrx-8.773.1.1
Wacom tablet
Bug found on 2.56 and on svn build 35222
Regards,
Rio
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Hi,
It indeed shouldn't happen, but it's still an issue with opengl... which is the same code for all Blender releases we do (freebsd, linux, osx, windows).
Officially FireGL is supposed to be high quality, but it's possible that drivers or installation is configured for other programs. Did you check on anything in your system to have access to opengl settings? Tweak it a bit :)
You could also try the different buffer swap methods we have in Blender; in user preferences -> system -> buffer swap method
To get this case properly debugged we depend fully on an opengl-savy developer with a similar system. FireGL is not very popular here.. for some reason. Please keep reporting testing info here though, hopefully it can be solved on your side!
(Moving to opengl tracker)
Thanks Ton,
Changing the Window Draw Method fixed it. However all settings except the Automatic setting work, which i think is weird. Shouldn't the Automatic setting choose one of the other settings and not be a setting of it's own? The glitches only happen when set to automatic.
Anyway, maybe you should stimulate the use of AMD FirePro cards, they are really good quality cards for very nice prices compared to the NVidia Quadro series. Besides AMD can use some support against the all mighty NVidia ;)
That's strange indeed; i checked the code, and the auto method only returns valid choices... in your case that would be 'triple buffer'
Yes well they all work but the problem hasn't gone away completely. Sometimes on a fresh boot of blender it still returns regardless of the setting i saved as default.
It seems a window move or change of the setting to what ever will make it go away again.
Isn't there any clue in your install/config/settings on the system? Official drivers should have some config menu from ATI i guess?
Professional cards suppor "Swap Exchange" for example, this should be "Swap copy". There might be other ATI buffer methods available to play with.
(Note that blender needs restart after changing system or driver settings)
I've been busy for a while and haven't been able to look at the bug again. But now i've tested it on RC1 after i've read your post about Intel Graphics on code.blender.org.
It seems that the displaced waveform polygon problem in the sequencer is gone, it is still very slow though when a cached strip is in view.
The flickering GUI problem is persisting sadly enough. All Window Draw settings except for Full show the flickering.
The Overlap Flip setting gives me the flash away Move to layer window so i guess my card is set for swap copy.
Triple Buffer is quite fast btw.
As for looking in the configuration software on the FirePro card, i haven't been able to find any settings related to the buffer.
Is the flickering GUI also on triple buffer or on overlap-flip? (disregarding the Move-to-layer)
That's really puzzling me... triple buffer should work perfect, especially for FireGL - which is supposed to have well tested drivers.
It would really help us when you can further investigate the issue. Maybe ATI has an help system for it, maybe there's an ATI control/config panel you can download, I also know professional cards allow to set per-application "opengl profiles". And then there's the X11 config file that probably does stuff...
Unfortunately none of our active developers use FireGL... and not many use ATI in linux.
After some time out of blender i decided to check if the problems still existed and I'm happy to report they're gone!
The changes I've done is using the latest blender release (official 2.57 r36273) and I've been running the beta FirePro drivers from AMD (packaging version 8.801).
I'm not sure which of the two did the trick, my guess is the driver. Thanks for you patience and help, i'm looking forward to all the vfx features and format support you're planning (OpenImageIO, Alembic, Collada, OpenColorIO, ptex).
Rio