Through some link-sequence I can't remember I ended up here, which contains a link to this entry on a Java2D bug on ATI cards. Here is the link from JavaSoft's "bugparade." The problem is essentially that on some platforms with some ATI cards Java2D works badly or simply hangs up the machine completely. A workaround that seems to work on some JDKs is:

Use -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true

This prevents our use of DirectX for rendering and apparently (according to the submitter) avoids whatever the freeze problem is.

The flag

-Dsun.java2d.d3d=false

is also worth trying (and a better, less constraining flag to use), but the
user has not yet been able to verify whether this avoids the bug since the
publicly release build is currently b14, which does not yet fully implement
the d3d=false functionality.

Now this is ugly.

This problem has been reported in relation to spaces a couple of times. At least JavaSoft has fixed it for JDK 1.4.1_02 (which should be released soon I assume). Something else that works as well in my experience is reducing the hardware acceleration settings on the card's video driver. The JavaSoft page contains links to other related bugs. This relates to what I was mentioning the other day about consistency within platforms being one of the few (if not the only) major problem remaining in Java. These things take time to resolve. Good to see we're getting there. Now if we could only have a decent configuration system that would work uniformly to set startup properties (including video settings, incremental garbage collection, JVM memory settings, etc) for applications, applets and JavaWebstart installations...

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on February 3 2003 at 12:10 AM