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3D acceleration with an Intel 82865G graphics card

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Even though the system is Debian Squeeze, these notes are valid for any GNU/Linux distribution with xorg as the X server.

With the Intel 865G graphics card we ran into the problem that rendering was not being done by hardware.

With «lspci» we confirm that we have the aforementioned card in a PCI slot.

$ lspci
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02

Graphics acceleration was being done in software.


$ glxinfo|grep render
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer

We need to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add the following:


Section "Device"
         ### Available Driver options are:-
         ### Values: : integer, : float, : "True"/"False",
         ### : "String", : " Hz/kHz/MHz"
         ### [arg]: arg optional
         #Option     "NoAccel"                   # []
         #Option     "SWcursor"                  # []
         #Option     "ColorKey"                  #
         #Option     "CacheLines"                #
         #Option     "Dac6Bit"                   # []
         Option      "DRI"       "True"          # []
         #Option     "NoDDC"                     # []
         #Option     "ShowCache"                 # []
         #Option     "XvMCSurfaces"              #
         #Option     "PageFlip"                  # []
         Identifier  "Card0"
         Driver      "intel"
         VendorName  "Intel Corporation"
         BoardName   "82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device"
         BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
     Option      "Shadow" "False"
EndSection

The key is the line with Option «Shadow» «False». Once disabled, this will activate DRI2. Simply restart the X server to check that we again have hardware acceleration:


$ glxinfo|grep render
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 865G GEM 20091221 2009Q4 x86/MMX/SSE2

If you want to know why this was happening, keep reading.

You may wonder why this is the case now. It is because there are reports that cards with the 8xx chip hang when Shadow and DRI2 are enabled. To avoid these bugs, the Debian maintainers have modified the xserver-xorg-video-intel package so that when Shadow is enabled, DRI2 and therefore hardware acceleration is disabled

This is the reason why, as this does not affect us, we modify the aforementioned /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

The message on the Debian list that gave the solution to your restless editor was the following:

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-user@lists.debian.org/msg585910.html