Missives from the 6th Floor

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July 19, 2008

Gorram Video Drivers

After a couple months of inactivity, I loaded up the SketchUp drawing I had made of the planned Kitchen remodel to review it and make some small changes.

I spent the next half hour trying not to chuck my notebook out the window in frustration, as SketchUp just refused to do what I wanted (specifically, the push/pull tool wouldn't select faces). I finally gave up on my drawing and tried a simple repro case, figuring something about the geometry in my drawing was screwing things up.

Nope - alone in the drawing field, the push/pull tool just wasn't working.

It work last time, so through the haze of frustration, I realized that my drawing hadn't changed, SketchUp hadn't changed, and the only thing that might have changed that seemed relevant was the video driver version.

So I disabled 3d acceleration and viola, it started behaving rationally (albeit slowly). Seems that ATI's latest Radeon Mobility drivers (8-6-mobile_xp32_dd_ccc_enu_64787) just don't work with SketchUp.

There's a half-hour of my life I'll never get back.

And since ATI doesn't "officially support" their mobile products (they defer you to the OEM, who tends to release drivers once in a dogs age) I'm pretty much screwed. Guess I can just use SketchUp in software rendering mode, but panning/rotating even my relatively simple room drawing is nearly unusable.

I hate computers.

Posted by dberger at July 19, 2008 11:51 AM

Comments

Posted by: Brad at July 19, 2008 4:51 PM