Constant crashing : Radeon 9200SE AGP

please help me LL..Today, as i've been playing second life, in the morning, Second Life crashes every 30 or so minutes, and thru-out the day, its been crashing more often, now, its crashing every 2 minutes!

here are my pc specs
-------------------------
ATI Radeon 9200SE AGP 128MB VIDEO CARD
Intel Celeron 2.4ghz CPU
512mb DDR PC3200 RAM
ASRock P4i65GV (not sure about this one) Motherboard

please help me! if anyone else is having the same problem, post please!

Same probs here

Radeon9600
AMD Athlon XP2500
1024mbRam

Both of you are crashing in the ATI driver, but for different reasons.

Anarki: Please goto http://www.ati.com and update your graphics driver to the latets release. The one you're running is more than a year old.

Sam: Have you changed any of the settings in the OpenGL preferences of your ATI control panel?

Colin

Colin, I have changed almost everything a thousand times including driver versions. No matter what, same. Any ideas on what open GL settings ought to be? Or any other suggestions would be greatly apppreciated.

Thanks for answering!

Sam

I've noticed some problems recently with the GPU perhaps taking too much bandwidth. This is why some (including myself) have experienced sound glitches such as choppiness and random pops/clicks that have ocassionally been so loud and high pitched it hurt my ears.

Also, atleast on my computer, running SL has been known to lock my computer up and in some instances of being on land with streaming music, I could still hear the music playing while the computer was frozen.

Simmilar things would happen with a game called Rise of Nations (don't even think of buying it. it's buggier than SecondLife) with lockups, sound glitches, and crashing to the desktop. Some of the techy-literate people had said it was a because of the AGP bandwidth over the system bus.

If this is the case with SL, setting your AGP speed one notch lower could help and still not noticably hinder the performance of SL. I know you can do this with ATI cards in the SMARTGART settings dialog. As for NVidia cards I'm not sure, but I assume it's simmilar.

This may not be a fix for you, but it's worth a try.

Colin,

(and I've let Dan know this)

The Catalyst driver released last month promised "quicker VPU crash recovery" but appears actually to prolong it on my Radeon 9500. I have since reinstalled the July Catalyst drivers, and they seem to work better, but...

... it seems since 1.5 that neither driver prevents the very frequent VPU crashes in SL. This appears to be related to transparency, and seems to be more frequent when alt-click rotating around an object (orbit).

I can't stress just how frustrating this bug is.

I'll be playing normally, not doing anything remotely that should crash or freeze SL, and bam, screen locks for up to a minute, and IF it recovers, I get a VPU crash error from the Radeon Catalyst software.

From all the crashes and locks this has caused, it seems clear to me that it is a 1.5 bug. I used to get VPU crashes occaisionally, but I want to stress the infrequent nature of it, and it was when I was doing things like orbiting my camera around things very quickly.

I've been posting in the forums about this, I've been sending in bug reports, I've sent IMs to bug testers... other people have done the same. We've done our part... please try and help get this as a priority to resolve!

edit: I've also noticed the AGP acceleration button is greyed out and unchecked since 1.5

Sincerely,
Hiro Pendragon

I've figured out how to get rid of the crashes i've been having, I turned off everything in the display and options panels, and turned them on 1 by 1, and saw which one crashed, it turned out to be shiny objects. and with my computer, theres a reason why my drivers are a year old, i had a radeon 7500, and when i updated to 9200se, i didnt uninstall the old drivers, so there was a giant collision, had to send it in to the computer shop, get it repaired, and it cost $50 AUD, so now im not even going to try touch drivers. ..

Also, Rise Of Nations isnt too buggy..i have it

I've been crashing regularly too with my ATI 9800 Pro and the new 4.9 Catalyst drivers. I'm about to quit SL and I don't really want to turn Shiny Objects off!

Same problems with Ati 9600. There IS a new Ati driver (dated 9-9-04 I think). Didn't help.

HELP SL!!

Apparently the problem with ATI cards is because we aren't allowed to use hardware rendering. There's a bug with the ATI opengl drivers, and I really wish this bug was on their top priority list because it's a big downfall for SL when played by Radeon users. And I'm not about to buy a GeForce just to play SL when I personally think ATI cards kick nVidia's butt! But that's a diferent topic.