Re: Z-Buffer on an ONYX...

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Allan Schaffer (aschaffe)
Tue, 16 Jul 1996 14:31:31 -0700

On Jul 17, 1:16pm, Kenneth Gordon wrote:
>
> I'm having a strange problem when running Performer programs on our
> ONYX, and I was wondering whether anyone has had to deal with that
> before. It seems almost like the Z-buffer is backwards. In the
> demo, there is a car circling around a town. When the car goes
> behind a building, you can still see the car. Also, when you zoom in
> on the car, all the parts of the car are backwards -- you see the
> trunk instead of the front of the car when it is facing you.

Are you running an old version of IRIX ?

This was a problem a while back (IRIX 5.2?) with a few of the admin
tools using up too much framebuffer memory (and then not giving it
up), so Performer wasn't able to allocate enough for itself. There
are some workarounds.. Here's some info from the archives:

Problem:

  chost & clogin used IL hardware acceleration which could tie up
  framebuffer resources, thereby making Performer applications unable
  to allocate a z buffer.

Solution:

  1) kill chost and clogin. (My recollection is that sometimes one
  had to stop and restart graphics to get the framebuffer back.)

  2) csh: "setenv IL_HW_ACCELERATE 0" or sh: "IL_HW_ACCELERATE=0"
  before running any desktop applications that might use IL, e.g.
  in your ~/.xsession or other X/desktop startup file.

This use of framebuffer resources by the desktop is supposed
to be fixed in IRIX 5.3, however we have not verified it.

[it hasn't been reported in a while..]

If this isn't it, write me back for some more suggestions.

Allan

-- 
Allan Schaffer                                             aschaffe++at++sgi.com
Silicon Graphics                            http://reality.sgi.com/aschaffe
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