For the past 1 year I have been endlessly trying to get the blur plugin to work in my laptop. I'm among the many people who suffer with this problem. Here's what I have understood till now after considerable amount of research.
I have an Intel GMA 950 card which comes as a default on the i945 chipset. In previous versions of CF i.e. <.7 builds, the plugin never worked due to a bug in the Mesa driver namely in the fragment_environment_variables section. Now in the new build (post .7), a new plugin with the name of 'Workarounds' attempted to provide a fix with the name 'AIGLX fragment program fix'. This helped in many ways by enabling effects like Water, Reflections to work properly on IGMA cards but the 'blur' system still had a problem.
Enabling the plugin caused the Mesa driver to kick compiz in software mode and effects fell to less than 1 FPS. Also, only the 4xBilinear filter(among the Gaussian & Mipmap filters) worked because a lack of FBOs (Frame Buffer Objects). Another small thing I noticed that while running compiz via terminal, is that a message 'Warn: No stencil buffer. Region based blur disabled', shows a faulty implementation of Mesa thus creating the problem in blur. Blur requires the stencil buffer system to work.
Many attempts are underway to port implementations such as 'Fake Blur' and 'BlurFx' into CF from the old Beryl system. Also, users are still sitting patient for the fixes in Mesa to come. Till then, no blur for IGMA users.
I have an Intel GMA 950 card which comes as a default on the i945 chipset. In previous versions of CF i.e. <.7 builds, the plugin never worked due to a bug in the Mesa driver namely in the fragment_environment_variables section. Now in the new build (post .7), a new plugin with the name of 'Workarounds' attempted to provide a fix with the name 'AIGLX fragment program fix'. This helped in many ways by enabling effects like Water, Reflections to work properly on IGMA cards but the 'blur' system still had a problem.
Enabling the plugin caused the Mesa driver to kick compiz in software mode and effects fell to less than 1 FPS. Also, only the 4xBilinear filter(among the Gaussian & Mipmap filters) worked because a lack of FBOs (Frame Buffer Objects). Another small thing I noticed that while running compiz via terminal, is that a message 'Warn: No stencil buffer. Region based blur disabled', shows a faulty implementation of Mesa thus creating the problem in blur. Blur requires the stencil buffer system to work.
Many attempts are underway to port implementations such as 'Fake Blur' and 'BlurFx' into CF from the old Beryl system. Also, users are still sitting patient for the fixes in Mesa to come. Till then, no blur for IGMA users.
No comments:
Post a Comment