632360 - Cannot get WebGL context on NVIDIA Quadro NVS 135M / Dell Latitude D630

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Graphics: CanvasWebGL, defect)

Description

[Stéphane Roucheray]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110207 Firefox/4.0b12pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b12pre) Gecko/20110207 Firefox/4.0b12pre

I can't get a WebGL context on my laptop with NVIDIA Quadro NVS 135M / Dell Latitude D630.

I tried to get the context with canvas.getContext("experimental-webgl") or with canvas.getContext("webgl"), either cases fail.

It used to work in the past (can't say from which beta it started to fail, though).



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to this site https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/webgl/sample3/index.html (or any well written webgl demo - ie with a context detection)
2. An alert box popup saying "Unable to initialize WebGL."




Expected Results:  
The demo should work well, the webgl context should be obtained

Drivers infos :

NVIDIA Quadro NVS 135M
Driver 6.14.11.7968
Date : 11/03/2009

Comment 1

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

Your driver is out of date. If you go to about:support it will tell you that you need to upgrade to 257.21 or newer.

Comment 2

[Stéphane Roucheray]

I updated the driver from the NVidia web site and it works well now. 

I'm just concerned about the driver version on laptops. I usually update my drivers only from the laptop manufacturer web site, in my case Dell, which qualifies very slowly (or even not at all) new driver version from graphic card providers. Thus the Dell qualified driver for my laptop is still the outdated 6.14.11.7968.

Is it an issue for Firefox, can Mozilla provide a more accessible information about that (about:support is great if you know it's there and you know what you're looking for) ? I can't tell. 

Maybe I'm wrong but would it be possible to output the about:support message about outdated driver in the error string generated by the call to canvas.getContext("webgl").

Comment 3

[Benoit Jacob [:bjacob] (mostly away)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I updated the driver from the NVidia web site and it works well now. 
> 
> I'm just concerned about the driver version on laptops. I usually update my
> drivers only from the laptop manufacturer web site, in my case Dell, which
> qualifies very slowly (or even not at all) new driver version from graphic card
> providers. Thus the Dell qualified driver for my laptop is still the outdated
> 6.14.11.7968.

We know that laptops have out of date drivers and that we're blacklisting many people. We believe that we don't have a choice.

> 
> Is it an issue for Firefox, can Mozilla provide a more accessible information
> about that (about:support is great if you know it's there and you know what
> you're looking for) ? I can't tell.

In the next version of Firefox, maybe. For 4.0, it's too late and we've had other priorities.

> 
> Maybe I'm wrong but would it be possible to output the about:support message
> about outdated driver in the error string generated by the call to
> canvas.getContext("webgl").

That would be possible actually. But it wouldn't fix much of the problem, as most users who don't look into about:support also don't look into the JS error console.