Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Troubleshooting

ATI Radeon Slowdown Problems

Go the ATI site driver downloads section and select the appropriate OS/graphic card. This will (most likely) link you to the d/l for the current Catalyst 4.4 drivers.

At the bottom of that page is a link to "Previous driver versions".

D/L the Catalyst 3.7 driver package. Run the EXE and it will extract the driver install package to:

C:\ATI\SUPPORT\

In this directory will be a directory named (for XP/Win2K users: \wxp-w2k-7-93-030812a1-010735c-efg\

This is where the driver install package is located. DO NOT RUN THE SETUP. You don't need to install the old driver.

Navigate down thru the dir structure to the following dir: C:\ATI\SUPPORT\wxp-w2k-7-93-030812a1-010735c-efg\2KXP_INF\B_10679

In this dir you'll find a file called: atioglxx.dl_ This is a "packed" version of the ATI OGL driver.

The next step specifies how you can extract these files to your hard disk using the 'expand.exe' utility included on the cd.

The 'I386' folder on the Windows XP CD contains a utility 'expand.exe' that can be used to uncompress all compressed dll files. It is a commandline utility, so you have will have to run it from either the command prompt or the Run dialog. Some examples of its usage are:

           expand X:\I386\ADROT.DL_ C:\ADROT.DLL
           The above command decompresses the compressed DLL

ADROT.DL_ on the WinXP CD, copies it to C:, and changes the extension to .DLL .

Just extract that file (atioglxx.dll) to your Blender install directory. Usually C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\

Launch Blender.... no more slowdown.

Addendum: I found this solved a problem of crashing on start up after updating my Catalyst driver from 7.2 to 7.8, that is expanding the old 7.2 atioglxx.dl_ to atioglxx.dll and copying it to the Blender directory.

For people who the above solution leads to Blender crash at start up

Thanks to Xenobius at Blenderartists Forum

This solution is tested on ATI radeon express 200 (x200) integrated video card. However it should work on other ATI card.

Download the Nvidia 53.03 Driver HERE

Extract the driver to C:\NVIDIA

Copy the nvoglnt.dll from the C:\NVIDIA folder to your blender program folder (i.e. C:\Programs Files\Blender 2.40\)

Rename nvoglnt.dll (the one in the blender program folder) to atioglxx.dll

Run blender...voilà! Blender runs like it should!

[This works, because it can't use proper gl calls and uses no hardware acceleration so speed goes crappy...]