ThorneLabs

Fedora 18 Fix OpenGL GLX Not Using Direct Rendering Error in Steam

• Updated May 14, 2017


I recently purchased an AMD HD 6670 graphics card to use with Steam in Fedora 18. However, whenever I would launch Steam, I was presented with the following error:

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

For more information visit https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9938-EYZB-7457.

After Google searching, I found all sorts of people trying to resolve this error with all sorts of different fixes.

The Steam Support page mentions several useful debugging steps, with the most important being the following:

As Steam is a 32-bit binary it is important to make sure you’re running the 32-bit glxinfo when you do this to match how Steam uses OpenGL. If you do not have a 32-bit glxinfo you can install the mesa-utils:i386 package.

However, mesa-utils:i386 is a package specific to Ubuntu. I am not sure if the following package is the direct equivalent to mesa-utils:i386 in Fedora, but installing it solved the above problem for me.

yum install xorg-x11-drv-catalyst-libs.i686

Re-open Steam, and the error should not be displayed anymore.

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