I'm using an Intel 915/910 chip and getting slow performance and "[driAllocateTexture:636] unable to allocate texture" from DRI when using vanilla X on Gentoo to load up a 2048x texture in OpenGL. Googling doesn't show up much, except for the occasional mention of the error when running open-source games. Turning down the texture size is the usual solution given, which fits in with what I've found as well - 1024x and lower does not cause the problem. Is the chip lying to me when it says it supports 2048x? Or do I need some more voodoo in my xorg.conf? :) Thanks!

Perhaps you don't have enough video memory for textures that big? Remember that those chips are shared memory, i.e. they use system RAM for texturing, and perhaps the amount of system RAM that is assigned for texture memory simply isn't big enough.

Mmmm, I thought that too. But I checked in the BIOS, and there's defintely 128MB allocated to the card, so that should fit a couple of 2048x textures easily - they're only 16MB each.

Don't forget there is a lot of other stuff also requiring video memory. Like X.org and your desktop environment.

Quote: Original post by Sander
Don't forget there is a lot of other stuff also requiring video memory. Like X.org and your desktop environment.

Yeah, but 96MB? :)

Besides, it's just vanilla Xorg - I'm not running a desktop environment, I'm xiniting straight into my app. And I've had this running on the same machine under XP, and it was fine. That's why I'm suspicious of either the driver (it can't do all the res' XP can either), or my setup of X.

INdeed, if you're running only X then it shouldn't use 96 MB. No idea what it can be then.

Just in case, you should still check whether those 128MB are actually used well. In your Xorg.log, there should be a line saying something like "allocating XX MB memory for textures". Double-checking that can't hurt.

Also, are you running a compositing manager (desktop effects)? Those things can eat up texture memory like crazy.

I'm away from the hardware in question until the new year now (there's only so much you can take with you when visit relatives ;) ) but I'll check the logs when I get back.

And nope, nothing at all except X. I type "xinit /home/myprogram" from a Gentoo command line, and that's it. With the exception of the DRI additions, my xorg.conf is as generated by the util that comes with X from Portage (I forget what its called).

Thanks!