ubuntu intel drivers

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slenkar(Posted 2008) [#1]
I noticed my game runs very slowly on the latest Ubuntu, is there a way of telling if Intel gfx drivers are installed?


dawlane(Posted 2008) [#2]
yes type glxinfo in a terminal or glxinfo | grep render
look for direct rendering and OpenGL vendor string in the output


D4NM4N(Posted 2008) [#3]
What dawlane said.

If it says:

direct rendering: No
then there is a problem.

Older Intels are useless IMO, the newer ones are ok i think :/


slenkar(Posted 2008) [#4]
yep it says

direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)



OpenGL vendor string: Mesa project: www.mesa3d.org
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect
OpenGL version string: 1.4 (2.1 Mesa 7.0.3-rc2)


dawlane(Posted 2008) [#5]
This would be a little easier if you had actually included the model of the graphics card.
Type lspci in a command terminal to list all the PCI/AGP hardware installed on your machine.

You could try changing a few settings in your xorg.conf file in /etc/X11.

Before you make any changes to this file it's best to make a back up with
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.bak


Then edit the file using gedit. It's sometimes best to learn and use the old style text editors like vi or nano rather than the GUI text editors (because some times you may have to boot with out the X server to fix any X config files that are corrupted)

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf


The important sections to look for are

Section "Module"

Make sure that Load "glx" and Load "dri" are there.

The next one is
Section "Device"


and the most important part in this section is the "Driver" item.

If it says
Driver "i810"

then try changing it to
Driver "intel"


Save your changes and reboot (or try Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace to restart the X Server)

If I remember, I am sure that hardware acceleration is built into the mesa driver for most intel cards (this isn't the case for nVidia and ATI) and some of them are picky and may need additional options.
Your best bet to try and solve these kind of problems would be to dig around in the unbuntu forums (and if you cant find an answer make post giving as much detail as you can).

and to use LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose just add glxinfo to the end like thus
LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxinfo


all this does is is list out the same information as glxibfo with a few extra bits.


D4NM4N(Posted 2008) [#6]
What ^-he-^ said.
He means 'Driver "intel"' by the way ;)

I still have my reservations about older intel series but i am probably wrong. (I could never get my i82815 working but thats an ancient one compared to yours)


dawlane(Posted 2008) [#7]
He means 'Driver "intel"' by the way ;)

oops.... Now corrected.


slenkar(Posted 2008) [#8]
Yep it works now thanks!