Answers to video card issues, OpenGL, & other problems. READ IT!

The link to this little text file may answer some of your problems but not all of them. The link is to an OpenGL site.
http://glsetup.com/readme.htm
Look below for the content of the file. I’m including it here in case you never get to the site I mentioned to read it for yourself and it’s helpful information that’s important.

README.HTM file
GLSetup Release Notes - readme.txt

GLSetup 1.0.0.121 Beta Release Notes - 4/12/01

Thank you for trying out the GLSetup Public Beta!

PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE FILE CAREFULLY. It contains VERY IMPORTANT
information you need to know before running GLSetup. You may
experience SERIOUS problems with your computer, including being unable
to run Windows, if you are not aware of the information in this file.

Please be a conscientious and responsible BETA tester, and REPORT ANY
BUGS YOU FIND using the information below in Section 3! Thanks!


  1. Table of Contents

  2. Overview

  3. Known Bugs and Issues

  4. Bug Reporting

  5. Credits


  1. Overview

GLSetup will detect your 3D graphics card and install the matching
OpenGL drivers. Games supporting OpenGL will include GLSetup to
ensure your system has drivers available to accelerate OpenGL 3D
rendering. GLSetup is also available for download at:
http://www.glsetup.com

This is the BETA release of GLSetup. You are expected to find bugs,
and then report them. See the sections below for more information.

GLSetup Public BETAs will not expire. You are encouraged to check the
website at http://www.glsetup.com for newer version often. You should
also register your email address with GLSetup to be notified of
updates for your specific card.

This file is installed as readme.txt in the GLSetup install directory,
and should be available wherever you downloaded GLSetup.exe. More
up-to-date information is available at http://www.glsetup.com.

GLSetup currently includes drivers for the following chipsets:

3Dfx
Voodoo, Voodoo2, Voodoo Rush, Banshee, Voodoo3, Voodoo3 3500TV,
Voodoo4, and Voodoo5

3Dlabs
Permedia 2 and Permedia 3

ATI
Rage 128, Rage 128 Pro, Rage Fury MAXX, Rage Pro, Radeon

Intel
i740, i810, and i815

Matrox
G200, G400, and G450

NVidia
Riva 128/128ZX and Riva TNT/TNT2/GeForce1&2/MX/Quadro1&2

PowerVR
KYRO

Rendition
Verite 2200

S3
Savage3D, Savage4, and Savage2000

Please visit http://www.glsetup.com for information on other chipsets.


  1. Known Bugs and Issues

Both GLSetup itself and most of the drivers it installs are BETA
quality. This means they have bugs and you should proceed with care.

Because GLSetup is a BETA product, it sometimes screws up. You are
running GLSetup at your own risk, so please read this bug list to
figure out how it might screw up on your system. If GLSetup fails to
work properly for you, please follow the instructions in the Bug
Reporting section (Section 3) of this document.

You can find a more up-to-date list of issues for GLSetup and each
display card at http://www.glsetup.comihvs/index.htm.

Critical Issues:

  • We have received reports from users having difficulties installing
    GLSetup over proxy Internet connections. If you are experiencing
    problems with installing Web GLSetup over a proxy, please check that
    your proxy settings are correct. If you continue to have problems,
    please check with your network admin for help, and if all else fails
    please file a bug report.

  • WinME users with Radeon cards please note the following: Currently
    we are experiencing a bug in our test lab with GLSetup crashing after
    the installation process finishes (after you click on the Finish
    button). When GLSetup closes an error box will pop stating that
    GLSetup has cause an error with a GLS*.TMP file, where * is a random
    number. So far this doesn’t seem to effect the installation and is a
    bug related to GLSetup itself and not the drivers. If you experience
    this bug and have any problems, please file a bug report. If you are
    a non-Radeon owner or are not running WinME and you experience this
    bug please file a bug report.

  • We’re trying to track down a problem where after installing GLSetup,
    you cannot switch out of 640x480 mode. Sometimes reinstalling the
    monitor drivers via the display control panel solves the problem.
    Uninstalling GLSetup also fixes the problem. If you have this
    problem, and can reproduce it repeatedly (in other words, you install,
    have the problem, uninstall, it goes away, reinstall, it occurs again,
    etc.), PLEASE send a bug report (see below) and mention this clearly.
    It would really help us track down the problem.

  • It is very important that you have the latest drivers for your
    motherboard installed before you run GLSetup. This is important for
    all users, but it is especially true for AMD CPU owners with ATI cards
    (ATI Rage MAXX cards will not even boot with the latest display
    drivers if the motherboard drivers are not up to date, and you’ll have
    to reboot in Safe Mode and uninstall them). Please update your
    motherboard drivers before continuing. The webpage for your computer
    manufacturer should be able to point you in the right direction to
    upgrade the motherboard drivers.

  • Your system should have DirectX 7 or higher installed before running
    GLSetup. Most of the drivers require DX7 to function properly. It’s
    not clear whether installing DX7 after running GLSetup is sufficient,
    but it seems to usually work in our tests. To be on the safe side,
    install DX7 before running GLSetup. GLSetup cannot currently detect
    whether you have DX7 installed before running.

  • Sometimes GLSetup will not detect a supported chipset if the
    previous drivers were installed incorrectly (or you told Windows not
    to install drivers when it detected the card). In this case, open the
    Device Manager by right clicking on My Computer, select Properties, go
    to Device Manager, and delete the device. Reboot. If the display
    device is a primary display device (the one on which your desktop
    runs), select Standard VGA. Finally, run GLSetup again.

Driver Related Issues:

  • WindowsMe users should be aware that the Savage4 driver (and
    possibly other drivers in GLSetup) has not be signed for WinMe. When
    GLSetup installs the driver, you will be prompted with a dialog by
    WinMe. To force the install, you must select the advanced button and
    then ask to be warned about unsigned drivers. Click ok, select yes to
    install the driver, and then proceed with the install as usual.

  • The ATI Rage 128 drivers included in this build of GLSetup may not
    detect some Rage 128 chipsets. Please file a GLBug bug report if you
    run into this problem.

  • The ATI Rage 128 Pro drivers on Windows95 will display a blue screen
    error in ATI2VXAA when booting. Ignoring this error seems to work
    fine in our tests. ATI has stopped testing their drivers on Windows95
    and only tests on Windows98 and newer OSes, but GLSetup continues to
    test the drivers on Windows95.

  • The 3dfx Voodoo Banshee drivers can display corrupted text when
    running in 32bit mode. Switch to 24- or 16-bit to fix.

  • Many drivers are not localized and will install in English even on
    non-English systems.

  • ATI Rage Fury MAXX owners are presented with the MAXX drivers, and
    two Rage128 drivers. Select the MAXX drivers, DO NOT SELECT THE RAGE
    128 DRIVERS IF YOU HAVE A MAXX. This is a bug in GLSetup’s detection
    code and it will be fixed shortly.

  • Make sure your NVidia TNT video card bios is up-to-date.

  • 3dfx Voodoo3 3500TV owners are presented with a choice of the 3500TV
    drivers or the default Voodoo3 reference drivers. Unless you’re
    having problems, it’s recommended that you use the 3500TV drivers.

  • The NVidia TNT and GeForce driver control panels on Win95 do not
    load the “Additional Properties” pages correctly.

  • The Intel i740 drivers need the usbsupp.exe Universal Serial Bus
    drivers installed to operate properly on Windows95. This program
    should be on your Win95 install disk if you received Win95 OSR2 with
    your computer. If you did not receive a Win95 OSR2 disc with your
    computer, do a search for usbsupp.exe on Mircosoft’s page.

  • The ATI drivers create a C:\ATI directory without asking for
    permission.

  • 3Dfx Voodoo2 SLI is detected as two Voodoo2 cards. Pick one and the
    install should work properly. Report a bug if it fails.

  • We have experienced hardware hangs in some graphically intensive
    games on certain NVidia Riva TNT2, 3Dfx Voodoo3, and S3 Savage3D
    boards. We believe this is a problem with these boards and Intel LX
    chipsets. There have also been problems reported on some AMD ALI
    chipsets.

  • The 3Dlabs Permedia 3 drivers appear to be broken when texturing on
    Win95OSR2. They work on Win98.

  • The Rendition Verite 2200 drivers have an anomalous flicker problem
    while running some games.

GLSetup Related Issues:

  • The installation progress bars and time estimates are usually
    completely wrong, especially on the web-based install.

  • GLSetup may occasionally install older drivers than the ones you have
    installed. If this happens and you did not choose to do this by forcing
    GLSetup to install the drivers, please file a bug report.

  • Uninstall has not been thoroughly tested. Sometimes it doesn’t
    work. Sometimes it uninstalls more than expected. Sometimes it doesn’t
    ask to reboot when it should. See the section below on how to report
    bugs the “right way.”

  • Running GLSetup and/or OpenGL apps on systems with multiple monitors
    has not been tested. Microsoft currently does not support OpenGL
    hardware acceleration on multiple monitor systems. Email them and
    encourage them to fix this. In the meantime, you can disable multimon
    in the display control panel to enable OpenGL hardware acceleration.

  • Changing the install directory has not been thoroughly tested. The
    install directory can be set to bad places, like the system directory
    and the root. Don’t do this.

  • Although a driver for a specific chip set may be supported by
    GLSetup, this does not mean all boards with that chipset are
    supported. For example, GLSetup will not detect a Real3D Starfighter
    PCI card, even though the Intel i740 drivers are included in GLSetup.
    The Starfighter PCI is incompatible with the Intel reference drivers.
    We’re always working to include more drivers in GLSetup, so check http://www.glsetup.com for updates.

  • If you have multiple supported video cards in your system, GLSetup
    will only allow you to install one driver per run.

  • GLSetup only runs on Win9x. It does not run on WinNT. Please see http://www.glsetup.com for information on OpenGL drivers for other
    operating systems.


  1. Bug Reporting

It is extremely important that you report bugs you find in GLSetup and
the accompanying drivers. However, how you report bugs is just as
important. We may not be able to reproduce a poorly reported bug, and
that greatly reduces the chances we’ll be able to fix it.

How to report a bug:

  1. If you run into a bug, STOP! Do not try to reinstall, or
    rollback, or fix it by hacking on files, or anything else. You might
    lose important information that indicates how the bug occurred.

  2. Run the GLBug.exe application installed into the main installation
    directory (an icon was created in your Start menu as well), and
    carefully fill in the requested information. Filling in this
    information accurately is very important if the bug is going to get
    fixed. If GLSetup had problems before it could install GLBug.exe, the
    application is available at http://www.glsetup.com or wherever you
    found GLSetup.exe.

  3. If you’re feeling dedicated to the bug hunt, try to reproduce the
    bug on your system. If you can give robust repro steps, this helps us
    immensely. Remember, do this after you capture the GLBug.exe
    report, and do not accidentally delete the report in this step. This
    may mean simply running GLSetup again. It may mean uninstalling and
    then reinstalling. It may be something complicated like waiting for a
    certain time of day or phase of the moon and trying to reinstall.
    It’s up to you to decide how much time to spend figuring out the
    reproducibility of the bug. The more information you send, the better
    chances we have of fixing the bug.

  4. Email the compressed GLBug.exe output along with any addition
    comments you have (perhaps from trying to reproduce the bug after the
    original output) to bugs@glsetup.com. GLBug.exe records a bunch of
    information about the state of your hardware so we can try to figure
    out why GLSetup failed. You can feel free to look at the information
    GLBug.exe is generating about your system, but please do not change
    it, and make sure you mail the compressed file to bugs@glsetup.com.

Thank you for testing GLSetup! Reporting bugs correctly means you’ve
made the most of your time, and ours!


Here’s another link to the same site with information on incompatibility issues for particular chipsets on video cards.
http://glsetup.com/ihvs/index.htm

It contains information on the following companies:
3DFX
3DLabs
ATI
Intel
Matrox
NVidia
PowerVR
Rendition
S3

I’m also posting my reply to one of the other topics in the forum in case you never get to read it. It contains some good information on problems with the game Medal Of Honor Allied Assault and some other technical problems.