https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36934
--- Comment #7 from Michel Dänzer michel@daenzer.net 2011-08-09 03:34:33 PDT --- (In reply to comment #6)
I observed that this corruption is often accompanied by these messages on the console from which I start a game:
What exactly does 'often' mean? If it's not always, it probably can't (fully) explain the problem...
radeon: mmap failed, errno: 1 Mesa: User error: GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY in glTexImage
Looks like this app ran out of memory. (errno: 1 means EPERM, not sure how that can happen...)
A possibly unrelated question: what happens if the scene to be rendered needs more than VRAM+GART amount of data?
It's up to the userspace drivers to split it up into smaller chunks that can fit.
A couple of random things to try would be radeon.agpmode=4 and =-1, disabling tiling, ... Trying a newer kernel and possibly r300g driver probably wouldn't hurt either.