video card driver error

Your incorrect, the architecture of these cards is homogenous, the difference is in the level of performance which is fine for SL on all but the lowest cards.

The challenge might be supporting nvidia and ati, but within those 2 groups.. there's no significant difference to create lots of hard work for linden lab .

SL does have to support both Ati and nvidia .

Nope, not correct.

ATI and nVidia have to support OpenGL on Windows platforms. Why do you think the drivers for both cards have fewer issues with Linux machines? The OS you take every opportunity to blow your horn on? Those drivers are optimized for OpenGL and not for DirectX.

Jeeze there's no way to argue with a Linux user.......they know everything about everything. Even the OS they hate the most..........LOL.

gah peggy, please open gl is the standard, its not specificly the video card makers problem

open gl is the standard framework for systems to be able to deal with 3d rendering functions, if you can compile open GL on your machine, you really wouldnt have to touch it when porting software over, its on every computer system, moderen video game machines, some cell phones, pda's ect

windows may be 80% of the pc game market, but open gl is pretty much 100% of everyone elses market

it would be stupid for someone like ATI or NVIDIA to be lacking on their ogl support, since they make chips for other products (ie the ps3, the xbox360, pda's, ect) when they really only have to write it once and be done with it

im 100% sure the op could run any other open GL with no problems, which goes back to what?

when everyone elses open gl programs run just fine on the new drivers ... that leads me back to the trouble maker

(and yes you can run many directX applications in linux using wine which just translates the instruction base to open gl, even with translation its often faster and better looking than under DX)

@osgeld+all, I think what a lot of these issues amount to is a few lines of code causing perf and other glitches with some cards, not a huge deal.

The SL code could be a total mess and then, I don't know .

I guess I'm having a problem making myself understood. OpenGL is a standard that is cross platform....it works on virtually every OS in existance except maybe some very specilized OS's that are developed for very narrowly defined programs. DirectX is also a standard that is not cross platform......it works on Windows based machines only (unless the use of some immulator is used to translate to another platform). I'm the CEO of nVidia and the Chairman of the Board for ATI (haha........don't I wish ) and I come out with a new "high performance" video card for each company and I want to market it. First thing I need to know is who my market is. I find it is people using Windows based computers (surprise, surprise....who'd thunk that? ). I need drivers for this fancy new card so I direct my peons to code drivers to enable the best and most advanced features of my new cards to the largest market out there...........Windows! I also don't want to loose those lesser markets so I instruct them to build drivers for them too..........but make sure the Windows drivers are as bug free as possible.

After the card is released I find a few of the features on my new card have issues with all platforms...........I got some unhappy campers out there. I direct my peons to fix it.......they do so with the same priority I issued on the initial development order: Windows first. As time goes on I finally get the drivers updated to fix the problems with all platforms.........the Windows issues were fixed within a few days. The issues with the other platforms followed by a few more days. All is well again........until I release another, higher performance card. It never ends.

Do I make any sense now? That's the point I was trying to make. You can argue til you are blue in the face but until you can prove a manufacturer thinks differently I'll never accept your argument as fact.

And OpenGL on PDA's, cell phones, or any other device capable of graphics rendering has nothing to do with a computer program using the engine for it's graphics rendering. Those devices have neither the power or resolution to run a program like SL.

And to Maylin........I'm sorry, I had you mixed up with another poster who does constantly toss out Linux as the solution to Windows problems. But, I still don't believe LL is the one to fix the OpenGL problems generated by drivers not supporting the graphics in SL. It's the card manufacturers duty to support the programs using the features of the card. The nature of SL is to push the envelope........the card makers will have to keep up to loose the battle. Someone else will get the market. I agree LL has problems that are not driver related.......I'm speaking of driver issues only.

Editing to add:
I'm speaking about drivers written for cards installed in Windows machines.......not for cards installed in Macs or Linux boxes.

But what about this situation:

All other OGL apps run flawlessly with a driver, load up SL and the user has the message 'unsupported video card' and maybe has glitches and perf glitches.

It is obvious the message 'unsupported video card' means 'We Linden lab have not yet done the work required to make our software work right'.

And that's the polite version. Again I'm referring to new and recent video cards that are selling like hotcakes, not some old crappy card.

Or, more likely, it simply means LL has not tested the card and cannot assure the user that it will work? Seems the more logical explanation for a message such as that.

Pretty hard for any software developer to test every card on the market.....let alone within days of the releasing of those cards. Kind of unrealistic of anyone to think they should be that up on everything coming down the pipe as fast as they come.

If the card works despite the message what's the problem? I wouldn't worry about it....let alone make a stink about it.

You'd be right. http://www.winehq.org/ Good stuff. Usually good for squeezing a few extra frames out of the hardware if your games aren't calling anything too ridiculous and undocumented. So far, the only game I've come across to fit this category is America's Army; which is unfortunate since I really got into that game when there was a Linux version. To those who think Counterstrike is better, I tend to prefer the slower, more strategic gameplay America's Army tends to offer; if the game's gonna move as fast as the typical CS round does, it's a little more interesting if it's a bit more madcap like TF2.



Though you gotta give it to Microsoft for going in an entirely different direction than the rest of the industry. Every other platform and most recent game consoles use OpenGL...



You say that, but there's a lunatic fringe that doesn't use any of the advanced features in Photoshop that could easily do the same thing in the gimp if they spent half the time expanding their knowledge instead of whining about the effort, that only stay in Windows because the're hardc0re graphics designers who absolutely need to drop rent money on the latest Photoshop every year or so. Yeah, there's a few real graphics designers for whom Photoshop is probably a wise investment, but most are hobbyists hellbent on brand loyalty...

I don't have a machine with a radeon in it running Linux at the moment, but I have earlier this year. I could have sworn there is a GUI that comes with the official ATI release. There is an open ATI driver available which is under heavy development right now, it comes standard with the Linux kernel and X server (as does pretty much every other video driver).

While I can't disagree that the video driver situation on Linux with high-end video chipsets could use some improvement, at least when I'm troubleshooting a driver issue on Linux, I can get useful output and have some resources to go to (such as Debian's mailing lists; Google, which has a dedicated Linux information search at http://google.com/linux; documentation) that I can look up the error lines from the output and, unless I'm truly unlucky, can find a workaround or outright fix.

While Windows does have the event logger, 90% of the time, output from the OS or the driver malfunctioning in the event logger is not usually useful in the same capacity as it is in Linux. If it's broke, it's broke, and there's no way around it. While this still happens on Linux, usually this is much more quickly resolved as the open source world favors release cycles as short as those of American top-40 pop acts.

It's obvious I'm referring to the glitches mentioned that are associated with the message. For an entity like Linden Lab it is very realistic to test the popular cards on the market practically the day they are released, even before they get to market if they cared enough too Why not test every single card that is sold on the market today by nvidia and Ati? there aren't that many and its a pretty trivial task, your trying to make out that a relatively easy task is very hard when it isn't.

While your claim is currently valid that Windows is the most popular OS, claims of greater accessibility are dubious given the greater buy-in costs and knowledge required to maintain a secure Windows system (case in point: knowing when Windows Firewall or your virus scanner is being paranoid or has a legitimate reason to bother you). I say this as someone who uses both platforms.



Sure, compare the open source model to the closed source model. The shorter release cycles and the greater number of developers means bugs tend to be shallower and more quickly fixed than with the longer development cycles and limited number of developers of the closed source development model. And even if it's not the solution for you, it's extremely poor form to be outright dismissive of a valid solution.

Every card supports OpenGL. DirectX is purely a Windows issue. Whether or not those drivers support OpenGL well is another matter. I believe it was brought up in the EU antitrust case that Microsoft was deliberately crippling OpenGL support to make DirectX look more attractive on Windows, never mind the rest of the world uses OpenGL.

I'm not sure this is exactly a vendor driver issue or a Microsoft issue, but I'm fairly certain that LL's not doing anything that existing hardware or the OpenGL standard isn't capable of. SL runs beautifully on my Linux box with a GeForce 7800 AGP, but runs like crap and frequently crashes the drivers on my Vista box with a Radeon 3400 HD. The hardware is willing but OpenGL support somewhere along the line in Windows is weak.

Haha...........I still ain't switching to Linux.

Not for SL anyway...........my experience with Linux was not all that bad, just to freaking complicated for someone who simply wants to be able to do things on my computer that appear to be fun or useful without having to know about kernal processes, or unpacking, mounting, compiling just to get a program on the computer in the first place. If you like that then, by all means, go for it.......but don't expect the vast majority of folks to agree with you. There is a reason people use Windows........beside name recognition.

And for the Photoshop/GIMP comment..........I use GIMP and love it.

Windows is more accessible than Linux.

- 1. More machines preloaded with windows on shop shelves etc etc.
- 2. Most would agree it's easier to use in many senses, has more software and hardware that works with it etc etc.

Look at the people that form the majority of the Linux userbase Linux has a long ways to go for most people - there might be a decent distro for a specific consumer device/purpose, but that's it for most people.

When all this changes, then we can say Linux is more accessible than Windows.

You are saying that LL can long term get away with not supporting both ATi and NVIDIA? o.O.

LL does not support either nVidia or ATI. They never did and never will. LL uses OpenGL for their graphics rendering. Any graphics card/chipset producer that supports OpenGL should be able to run SL without a hitch.........as long as THEY (the graphics card/chipset producers) optimize their OpenGL support to properly render the features LL uses in SL to get the graphics displayed on the users' monitors. I know of no other software that pushes graphics rendering to the level of SL. Call it "cutting edge" or just plain stupid if you like, it's something the graphics manufacturers have to deal with..........not LL.

Yes, I know, LL often pushes that envelop pretty far and gets way ahead of what the graphics producers can handle. But that's what makes for better technology in the long run.........pretty hard for us users on occassion but that's life when you are dealing with a beta program like SL. If all OpenGL programs remained static for long periods of time then OpenGL would be next to perfect. Many programs do remain static.......not so with SL. So it's constant "catch up" if the manufacturers are going to work with SL.

Call it LL's fault if you like....but the onus is on the graphics people to keep up. Not for SL to slow down so that life is easier on them. I think everyone knows, the computer technology, if you can't keep up you loose. NVidia and ATI won't slow down but they will always be lagging until SL slows down.........which will happen eventually.

When/If LL goes through the testing and 'supported video card' list certification process for cards that are not on the said list, then they will be supporting nvidia and ati equally.

Notes:
- Cards on the supported video card list seem to have less performance issues.
- Some new cards that are obviously capable of good performance and are not on said list have performance glitches.

And that list of supported video cards is probably 2 years old. Much like the minium requirements for successful running of SL (that is at least 3 years old that I know of).

I'm not saying LL is on top of mundane things like supported hardware and system requirements...........that is something they really fall on their asses over.

So in the end we reach agreement on the only point I was making.
Users don't have access to a list (incomplete or not) of cards that give the 'unsupported video card' error message and associated performance etc glitches - users have to go off of hearsay in the forums etc to be sure what new or older generation card to go and buy which works best with least glitches in SL.

Yeah, sort of.

But I don't worry too much about that......if I see a card I want, I'll get it. I can read specs and sometimes understand them. Though I tend to read a lot in the forums and which major card manufacturer is having the most issues and sort of shy away from them. Right now I wouldn't be too interested in ATI.......even though I've had pretty good luck with them a couple years ago. I'm sure some day I will shy away from nVidia for the same reasons.

Ain't it fun though?

Gamers are all over the ATi 4850 right now

- Users should experience the best/near-best performance with ANY recent/new PC with a recent/new and sufficient video card, that is what the average consumer expects and LL needs to deliver . That is what consumers are accustomed to with the other applications they use e.g. games.

- Consumers should be confident in buying any such box without worry.