Windows display driver woes & what it gives you

If you're among the people running Windows with an ATI graphics adapter, you might have suffered from issue 48454 - ridiculously slow Impress presentations, sometimes followed by a bluescreen of death.

When we first encountered this problem on one of our machines, the blame was put on flaky hardware or a botched Windows installation. Unfortunately, after shipping OOo 2.0, more and more reports crept in, reporting BSODs or closely related issues while doing slideshows on ATI graphics.

On last year's CeBIT, Jacqueline (German native lang lead) was able to grab a guy from ATI, who acknowledged the problem, guessed a buggy video bios and provided some (ultimately unsuccessful) fixes. In the end, the only thing that appears to cure the crash is reducing the hardware acceleration slider in the Windows display settings (but see here for a bag of other workarounds).

Pretty ugly to tell our users. But now comes the funny part: StarOffice 8, our commercial product, has shipped with a DirectX-accelerated slideshow implementation - which, you won't believe it, does not suffer from the driver crashes. Lesson learned: driver quality is cared for (only) where the high-end customer needs it (i.e. for gaming).

Best of all, that DirectX-enabled backend will become open source RSN, thus indirectly fixing issue 48454. Sheesh - since I've poured around one week into utterly unsuccessful darkness poking, rearranging code, trying alternate functionality etc. to avoid the deadly call sequence...

Needless to say, that the DirectX backend seriously rocks, with built-in antialiasing, and lightning-fast effects! ;-)

tags: directx graphics

Comments

pagalmes said: Hi Thorsten, thanks a lot for that blog post explaining all this, you really rock ;-) BTW, could you give us some more information about when will that Direct-X rendering be opensourced, and when will it be included in OOo? Cheers, Pierre-André

Posted by pagalmes on May 02, 2007 at 08:42 AM CEST #