Major rendering issues using ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450

The problem also occurs when running 'unity -p'. Unfortunately, it looks to me as if the attached debug output doesn't give any clues about what goes wrong.

This seems to be a video-driver issue with the Mesa-driver for ati/radeon.

I'm using an iMac with ATi 2600pro and the free driver, Ubuntu 10.10. I'm affected by it too.

I can confirm this bug. As an observation, I get the same glitches in Gnome-shell, while in a normal desktop session, mutter runs flawless. (Same graphic card as original poster)

As the radeon driver doesn't always support the kind of shader effects that we are attempting to do with Unity, we are going to add some debugging options to CluTK which will allow you to disable the effects and see if that at least let's you use Unity (and also let's us make sure these rendering bugs aren't caused by something else).

Which version of the fglrx-driver did you use there? Did you grab it from the normal ubuntu-repository (synaptic & Co)?

@Mirco Müller: I didn't use fglrx-driver because back then, because installing it would make it impossible to boot the system, while the free radeon (merged with radeonhd?!) driver did its job perfectly well on the default Ubuntu desktop with effects enabled.

With the latest updates applied, it's still possible for me to reproduce this bug. However, I might give fglrx another try and let you know about the results.

Well, there we go. fglrx shot my system to pieces once more. ;-) There was a problem configuring it ("Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel [...]") which prevents the system from booting the graphical environment. I might use a live environment to get hold of make.log. Of course, this is something unrelated to this bug.

Same problem, neither with radeon or fglrx with an ATI 4650 card...

I discover on this post http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=561206#30 about rendering problem with Gnome-Shell and ATI something that make my Unity ( and my gnome shell too) a little bit better ( but still impossible to use) : you launch unity ( or gnome-shell) from a terminal, with this before : CLUTTER_VBLANK=none
example : CLUTTER_VBLANK=none . Maybe this is a clue that could help to fix this ATI relative problems!

Marking as affecting mesa. This is fixed, or almost fixed, in mesa 7.9.

I still have the problem on my hp tx2.
The graphic card is ATI HD3200.

Mesa : 7.8.2-2ubuntu2

And I am running the last ubuntu Maverick update.

The attached screenshot shows the default screen of unity using radeon open source driver.

Unfortunately, Mesa 7.9 from ppa:sarvatt/mesa causes the screen to go blank (white) when launching Unity.

We believe this bug is fixed by this package, if it is not please reopen this bug.

mesa (7.9~git20100909-0ubuntu1) maverick; urgency=low

  [ Robert Hooker ]
  * New upstream git snapshot up to commit 94118fe2d4b1e5 (LP: #631413)
  * New features include ATI HD5xxx series support in r600, and a vastly
    improved glsl compiler.
  * Remove pre-generated .pc's, use the ones generated at build time
    instead.
  * Remove all references to mesa-utils now that its no longer shipped
    with the mesa source.
  * Disable the experimental ARB_fragment_shader option by default on
    i915, it exposes incomplete functionality that breaks KDE compositing
    among other things. It can be enabled via driconf still. (LP: #628930).

  [ Christopher James Halse Rogers ]
  * debian/patches/04_osmesa_version.diff:
    - Refresh for new upstream
  * Bugs fixed in this release:
    - Fixes severe rendering corruption in Unity on radeon (LP: #628727,
      LP: #596292, LP: #599741, LP: #630315, LP: #613694, LP: #599741).
    - Also fixes rendering in gnome-shell (LP: #578619).
    - Flickering in OpenGL apps on radeon (LP: #626943, LP: #610541).
    - Provides preliminary support for new intel chips (LP: #601052).
  * debian/rules:
    - Update configure flags to match upstream reshuffling.
    - Explicitly remove gallium DRI drivers that we don't want to ship.
  * Update debian/gbp.conf for this Maverick-specific packaging
  * libegl1-mesa-dri-x11,kms: There are no longer separate kms or x11 drivers
    for EGL, libegl1-mesa-drivers now contains a single driver that provides
    both backends.

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2010 08:55:40 -0400
Changed-By: Robert Hooker <robert.hooker at canonical.com>
Maintainer: Ubuntu X-SWAT <ubuntu-x at lists.ubuntu.com>
Signed-By: Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com>
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+source/mesa/7.9~git20100909-0ubuntu1

Now I have a full white desktop with nothing in it instead of old problems.
Will reopen the bug.

Ikbel,

This is a common issue right now; lots of people reporting it (see bug #638725, bug #608361, bug #616997). From bug #608361, Vish makes this recommendation, from the command line execute:
  $ ubuntu-bug xserver-xorg-video-<driver>

where <driver> would correspond to the graphics card your system has.

Once you've done that, you need to "also affects" Unity. Then come back to this bug and add a comment with the new bug number.

See his original comment here:
  https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/608361/comments/8

Thanks!

Just filed bug #638948 as suggested by Vish.

Submitted bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/639641 as suggested

It's a pleasure for me to report that a recent Clutter update seems to have fixed the white screen bug and cleared the stage for a working Unity interface! Thanks to all who have contributed to fix this problem!

There are only minor rendering issues left which don't hurt usability badly, but certainly need to be fixed in order to make a good impression. I'm going to report my new findings in a separate bug.

Thank you Severin for the update. If you can report those issues separately, then I'll close this for now, and we can start afresh with the bug hinting :)

I should add, if you still can't even see the Unity interface on your radeon, please reopen this bug.

I don't want to close it for no reason, but if you can use unity and are suffering now from medium-level rendering bugs, having those as separate bugs is just easier to handle for us, thanks!

It's exactly as you describe it. It's now possible for me to use Unity on my laptop with the ATI Radeon graphics card (+ radeon driver) in question. There are no show-stopper rendering issues left, but just minor issues that would prevent Ubuntu 10.10 from being the perfect 10. :-)

Problem depens on me too. the normal radeon driver works but has some graphic errors (screen). if i use the flgrx-driver it look better but my mouse is jerking. dont know why. the cpu usage is also much higher in unity as in gnome. in unity about 40-60% in gnome max 7% without any open programs.

I still see this problem with

xserver-xorg-video-ati:
  Installed: 1:6.13.99+git20101102.2a7b0807-0ubuntu0sarvatt~maverick
libgl1-mesa-dri:
  Installed: 7.10.0+git20101104.e7f5d19a-0ubuntu0sarvatt~maverick
unity:
  Installed: 0.2.46-0ubuntu5

It will not be soled for maverick, because maverci's version of UNity use mutter, wich bring these problems. Natty's version will use Compiz, and should bring a better compatibility with graphics cards, as compiz is used since a while in Ubuntu.

Me to. I open a bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-ati/+bug/676661