Seriously, guyz???



  • @boomzilla said:

    Possibly. The date on the driver is June 2012. It's possible that 7 and 8 were using even older drivers. That would be another WTF, of course.

    It would be par for the course. You don't know how many times downgrading AMD drivers fixes things. They are awesome at programming.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Then 8.1 this summer. Everything seems fine (aside from being stuck on Win8, of course), except Minecraft now refuses to run on her machine. Apparently, the drivers for it are all old and don't support newer versions of something or other in windows. And apparently Minecraft thinks this is important and now refuses to work for her.

    I'm surprised. While I don't play MineCraft, most of the issues I've heard about with it lately have been due to MineCraft 1.8 not liking Java 8 (or at least not 8u20/8u25).


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    First of all, that's gibberish.

    No, but you're stupid.

    Minecraft uses OpenGL via LWJGL. If the latter can't find an accelerated video mode, that's the error it gives back to Minecraft. I've seen the error when running on a machine with only the out-of-box Microsoft drivers.

    If Minecraft is complaining about video drivers it's almost certainly because OpenGL can't find a hardware-accelerated video mode to run in, and is saying in usual clueless-developer mode, i.e., with an ununderstandable message, it isn't willing to run at 1fps.

    @blakeyrat said:

    I am staggered by your telepathy.

    Gee, perhaps I've run into similar situations, but didn't think pointing out all that was relevant, because if @boomzilla can get a driver, his daughter can play the game.

    Your shoulder aliens suck and you should fire them.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    I tried installing the latest version of Catalyst nonsense, and that failed for some reason.

    Most likely because your card was no longer supported, or AMD, thanks to whoever made the laptop, blocks it from working, as I said upthread. I've seen both of these situations personally. Catalyst should, in the latter case, say something to the effect it can't find a driver for your system. If you dig around--it's been a long time since I did this--you should be able to find some 3d graphics forum that has a patch or something that will let you still install the driver.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @powerlord said:

    MineCraft 1.8 not liking Java 8

    Actually it's usually mods like voidswrath have a crash problem: Java changed the implementation of a collection to throw an exception under certain circumstances, and a common library (Forge) used a class that was affected by this change. Someone wrote a modified version of that particular class for three Minecraft versions (1.6.4, 1.7.2, and 1.7.10) that you can drop into the Forge Jar, and it'll start working again, so you don't have to take Forge's advice, which is "downgrade to a Java version that has known vulnerabilities and make sure your AV is up to date."


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @FrostCat said:

    If Minecraft is complaining about video drivers it's almost certainly because OpenGL can't find a hardware-accelerated video mode to run in, and is saying in usual clueless-developer mode, i.e., with an ununderstandable message, it isn't willing to run at 1fps.

    Hmmm...this is sparking memories...ISTR having to separately install some sort of OpenGL stuff on her machine. Maybe that got wiped out.

    @FrostCat said:

    Most likely because your card was no longer supported, or AMD, thanks to whoever made the laptop, blocks it from working, as I said upthread.

    It's a Dell. How would they disable the driver from being installed? I'm assuming (could easily be wrong) that if it was software it should have gotten wiped out in one of the Windows upgrades.



  • @boomzilla said:

    It's a Dell.

    They do have a history of disabling drivers. It's dumb, especially when you're dealing with AMD and have to guess which version won't destroy OpenGL.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    It's a Dell. How would they disable the driver from being installed?

    Guess what? Dell is one of the vendors that does it!

    I don't know how it works exactly, but I found documentation that it was being done on AMD's web site, because I used to have an XPS with a Radeon X300, and I couldn't use AMD's drivers, only Dell's, and of course Dell only ever issued like one update, so people who wanted Vista/7 were SOL. I would imagine they check a vendor string somewhere, maybe in the BIOS.

    If I wasn't reasonably sure about this I would've put a lot more maybes and IIRCs upthread. If the legacy drivers won't work for you and you can't use the current ones, etc., your best bet, if MC is important to your kid, downgrade the OS or switch to Linux, because at least the Linux AMD driver works.



  • In summary: TRWTF is Dell. And Java. And AMD.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    No doubt.

    And Mojang, of course. I won't mention [spoiler]Microsoft[/spoiler] because their WTFness, like a spherical cow, is assumed.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Actually, I don't think it's Mojang in this particular case. I took a look...

    I found that I'd downloaded an install for AMD Catalyst blahbityblah back in April. It says it's installed, but it's not there on disk. Trying to re-install it in 8.1 (was previously installed on 8) doesn't seem to work. Again, the system seems to think it's installed, but it doesn't start up.

    So...something fooey about 8.1 is still my best theory. And the reason MC won't work is because it's missing the OpenGL driver or whatever. Which I now recall installing before on Win8.



  • "Everyone keeps telling me that Dell messes with drivers and that AMD is bad at drivers. But I'm doing this on Windows, so it's Microsoft's fault."

    I mean, that's almost as bad as thinking that installing OpenGL involves something other than your GPU drivers. Oh wait...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    Actually, I don't think it's Mojang in this particular case.

    Oh, they just share blame in general for using Java.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Magus said:

    "Everyone keeps telling me that Dell messes with drivers and that AMD is bad at drivers. But I'm doing this on Windows, so it's Microsoft's fault."

    It's the same Dell machine. The only thing that changed is Windows. I know that you keep wanting to blame AMD and Dell, and surely something they've done has contributed, but it's clearly something MS changed that broke stuff here.

    Looking around at AMD's website again, they have a new version of stuff for 8.1, but only supports newer stuff, so I guess I'll have to try some of the workarounds I've seen.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @FrostCat said:

    Oh, they just share blame in general for using Java.

    Well, I think it's the lack of OpenGL, which isn't java specific, but I guess is a bit of a pariah on Windows.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Well, I think it's the lack of OpenGL, which isn't java specific, but I guess is a bit of a pariah on Windows.

    And that part is Microsoft's fault -- they could have built an OpenGL implementation that runs atop Direct3D, or whatever lower-level API sits between the D3D libs and the actual graphics card driver. But noooooo, they had to leave OpenGL support COMPLETELY up to graphics card vendors. So, some (read: nVidia) support it well because their cards have a hardware architecture that lends itself well to OpenGL support (the nouveau folks figured this out the arduous way), while others (ATI) have support that is 'meh' at best and lousy at worst because well...they have to do a bunch of software work to implement it in a properly performant way, and they don't want to do that. Intel Extreme Buggy Graphics are their own can of worms, of course...


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @tarunik said:

    And that part is Microsoft's fault -- they could have built an OpenGL stack that runs atop Direct3D, or whatever lower-level API sits between the D3D libs and the actual graphics card driver.

    Or they could have just left the installed version of OpenGL in place during the upgrade.



  • @tarunik said:

    Intel Extreme Buggy Graphics are their own can of worms, of course...

    And yet they're better at running OpenGL at all than AMD is these days.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @tarunik said:

    Intel Extremely Buggy Graphics

    FTFY

    What, DIscurse, now you broke quoting again?



  • @boomzilla said:

    Or they could have just left the installed version of OpenGL in place during the upgrade.

    In an alternative universe, Boomzilla upgraded to 8.1 specifically to fix a busted driver and is pissed Microsoft did leave it in place.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    In an alternative universe, Boomzilla upgraded to 8.1 specifically to fix a busted driver and is pissed Microsoft did leave it in place.

    That's possible. I envy that guy, because it means someone came up with a solution to prevent Microsoft from breaking this shit.



  • To be fair to ATI/AMD, there was a long period of time where OpenGL was stone-dead.



  • My point is, whatever behavior Windows has, it's wrong for someone.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    I won't argue against that point.



  • And that's cool and all, but the end result is that Tegra is still succeeding, while AMD is sitting around still writing bad drivers.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The obvious solution is to not run the drivers inside the kernel, like Windows did in NT4, then didn't do for a long time for performance reasons, then did again in Vista. Not to put all the drivers in the kernel so you can "guarantee" correct code.

    I suspect you're conflating "runs in ring 0" vs. "runs in ring 3" with "drivers as loadable modules that are compiled outside the kernel source tree" vs. "drivers that are compiled alongside the kernel".

    Unless, that is, you are saying that NT4 had ring3 drivers -- hats off to Dave Cutler and co. if that was the case, then!



  • @Magus said:

    AMD also hates OpenGL

    Grrr!

    I used to be really into model railroading, and there is a great model railroad design program — really head-and-shoulders above any competing products, at least it was the last time I was paying any attention. It's basically a specialized CAD program, and like (almost?) all CAD programs, it talks OpenGL.

    The hoops the developer1 had to jump through to get it to work for people with ATI/AMD graphics. Frequent crashes, and even when it worked, slow as molasses. On the support email list, you could tell who had what kind of graphics card by the type of problems they were reporting. OTOH, Nvidia just worked.

    1One-man software shop, but a solid, high-quality2 product, and great customer support; one time I reported a bug, and like an hour later had a fix — although a couple of days is probably more typical.
    2From the users' perspective. It's not open-source, so I have no idea what the code looks like. It may be WTF-y as all get out, but it works really well.



  • @FrostCat said:

    What, DIscurse, now you broke quoting again?

    Using markdown syntax to italicize or bold part of a word has never worked, at least not in Discurse's implementation. You have to use HTML or BBcode for that.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Minecraft actually says something like, "Your drivers are out of date," so it's obviously something to do with drivers.

    Don't assume the error message is always spot-on. I've seen people get messages along the lines of: "Unable to write to this drive. Please check your permissions and try again." That turned out to be a drive with 0 free space. Delete unused files, oh look! They can save their file there now.

    @powerlord said:

    I'm surprised. While I don't play MineCraft, most of the issues I've heard about with it lately have been due to MineCraft 1.8 not liking Java 8 (or at least not 8u20/8u25).

    One possible explanation right there.

    @boomzilla said:

    I may just throw a VM on there and be done with it.

    This sounds like a practical solution.



  • @redwizard said:

    Don't assume the error message is always spot-on.

    Microsoft Zune once told me my computer didn't have any sound cards because I unplugged a USB headset. (It had 2 sound cards at the time.)



  • @Magus said:

    "Everyone keeps telling me that Dell messes with drivers and that AMD is bad at drivers. But I'm doing this on Windows, so it's Microsoft's fault."

    @boomzilla said:

    It's the same Dell machine. The only thing that changed is Windows.
    ...
    Trying to re-install it in 8.1 (was previously installed on 8) doesn't seem to work.

    Worked on 8 but not 8.1 = Windows is likely the culprit, not Dell.

    Unless Windows 8.1 is really Windows 9 and nobody told me...

    And this is not taking into account possible Java change coinciding with the Win8.1 upgrade.



  • Sound hardware has only ever gone backwards. If I un/plug my usb headphones in with Firefox1 open, there's a 50% chance that Firefox forgets how to sound and has to be restarted before anything that plays sound will work. It's not that it'll work but silently, it just doesn't work. YouTube videos will throw "an error occurred" every single time.

    Even 3.5mm RCA headphones give me grief, if I plug them into my front panel audio ports with something running it won't bother to change the output stream. I seem to remember this working fine in the past, what went wrong?

    1: TRWTF



  • There's nothing wrong with the hardware, the problem is we have developers who are writing software in 2014 who are not aware that plug-and-play exists. In other words, they're 20 years late to the game.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @redwizard said:

    Don't assume the error message is always spot-on.

    I'm not. My conclusion is also based on previous experience with the same problem and a solution. I just didn't remember it all at first.


  • FoxDev

    .... switch to Chrome?



  • Say that all you want, but if a new version of Linux came out that wasn't compatible with your GPU drivers, the drivers would get updated to work again. Dell doesn't let AMD do so. Even if they did, Catalyst working is all luck.


  • BINNED

    @Magus said:

    Say that all you want, but if a new version of Linux came out that wasn't compatible with your GPU drivers, the drivers would get updated to work again.

    After you downgrade your X server, in AMD's case.


    Filed under: [damn it SwiftKey, how the hell do you autocomplete X to Christmas?] (#)



  • It's a Latin thing. X is an ancient abbreviation for 'christ' and has been used in the form X-Mas for a long time.


  • BINNED

    I know that, I'm wondering what kind of turbo optimistic language model this thing has where "oh, look, a single capital x, he must be thinking about Christmas!" makes sense.

    Generally it's really good, but sometimes it just takes a leap into "helping too much" territory.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Onyx said:

    I know that, I'm wondering what kind of turbo optimistic language model this thing has where "oh, look, a single capital x, he must be thinking about Christmas!" makes sense.

    Yeah, at least wait until Advent to start that sort of thing.


  • kills Dumbledore

    It has some sort of "trending" engine these days, so if lots of people are typing Xmas it will add it to the auto correct.



  • @Jaloopa said:

    It has some sort of "trending" engine these days, so if lots of people are typing Xmas it will add it to the auto correct.

    Hmm, how can we (TDWTF) abuse this feature?


  • kills Dumbledore

    Everybody type purple dildo a few hundred times at a pre arranged time?



  • @Magus said:

    Dell doesn't let AMD do so. Even if they did, Catalyst working is all luck.

    Not contesting that at all. I know Dell is TRWTF (we stopped dealing with them way back in 2003 for various reasons).



  • @Magus said:

    It's a Latin thing. X is an ancient abbreviation for 'christ' and has been used in the form X-Mas for a long time.

    This explains a lot when trying to do things on a Mac...



  • @accalia said:

    .... switch to Chrome?

    I stopped using Chrome because I couldn't stand using a browser that acts like it knows better than me. It was around the point of "THIS PAGE MIIIIIIIIIIIGHT BE AN ATTACK SITE, GO SOMEWHERE ELSE", and making me jump through hoops (not many, but more than zero) to install addons that weren't from the Chrome store thingy.

    Firefox isn't that much better, but at least it pretends not to think I'm a drooling imbecile.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    The latest version of Chrome hid the "keep" button for "this file isn't well-known" behind a menu. I wasn't going to re-download a 1.5GB file that took an hour or two, so I looked carefully for where they'd hidden it.


  • BINNED

    @Onyx said:

    he must be thinking about Christmas!

    From November to 15 January: X -> Christmas
    All other days: X -> XXX



  • Chrome also reloads all your tabs when you launch it, playing all 35 youtube tabs you have open. You can get addons to pause those tabs when they launch, but Firefox's load on demand is a bit nicer, imo.


  • BINNED

    One of the very few things new Opera (Opera Chromiclone™) did better than stock Chrome:

    The other one is the Speed Dial. Though there is a new one available now and it's butt fugly. Hope they don't ditch the current one in favour of the new abomination.


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