Steam & old Ati (AMD) video cards

I dare not say if this fix goes for all older Ati / AMD video cards, but it has helped me a few times now. Because I always forget where I found the answer, I post this to my ‘how did it I fix this again‘ blog-part.

It happened a after upgrading to Ubuntu 14.10 (open source drivers worked fine for games like TF2, Civ V, etc):

OpenGL GLX context is not using direct rendering, which may cause performance problems

Apparently there are some issues with some 32 bit libraries which are shipped with Steam, after which it doesn’t use the systems own libraries any more (some websites state that you should first check if:

glxinfo | grep render

shows the system shows something like:

direct rendering: Yes
GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
GLX_MESA_multithread_makecurrent, GLX_MESA_query_renderer,
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV770
GL_MESA_texture_signed_rgba, GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_depth_clamp,
GL_NV_blend_square, GL_NV_conditional_render, GL_NV_depth_clamp,
GL_OES_fbo_render_mipmap, GL_OES_get_program_binary, GL_OES_mapbuffer,
)

Most websites will tell you to remove the following libraries:

~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1
~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1

The location of the libraries may vary. In my case it’s located under:
/home/user/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/

That was it.

Krijn

Krijn Soeteman is a Dutch science and technology journalist. He majored in the history of art and architecture. After his studies he started as a music video producer. This led to producing a Museum Night at the NEMO Science Museum, which eventually led to science journalism. And much more.

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