ATI Catalyst 4.5 out, claims SL-related fix

Yup, as of 2004-05-12, ATI has released their Catalyst 4.5 drivers.

From their release notes:

Told you it was their drivers.

Sucky ATI people.

It seems to have fixed the chrome missing one of the six environment cube faces too. So chrome looks better now.

But faces still flash orange and black at various detail levels (distance from cam)

A little followup. Yes, environment mapping is indeed fixed, although minimizing and then restoring the windowed SL client remains a pretty effective way to corrupt textures. But... we have a working shiny!

For the first time since joining in February, I can now see a variety of builds the way their creators intended. It's great!

Moleculor: Why are you trolling? I mean, what's the point? Are you insecure about your choice of video cards? Bleh, let's leave this stuff for the rant forum.

Have they fixed the AGP = crash, reboot problem?

heh actually the lindens fixed the 'classic' ati texture corruption (the green noises mixed with black bars) fairly quietly in the eatly 1.3.x's i think around 1.3.3

the specific corruption mentioned in the ati driver release is in regards to environment mapping

ooh an this driver set was slightly bugged for me on install... it got stuck in software compatability 2d (desktop graphics) mode and had to manually update and pick the specific new driver to get it to lock back into 3d acceleration

The 4.5 drivers don't fix my current problem (millisecond flashes and corruption of the screen)

LF

And you were wrong. Texture corruption occurs on all Radeon cards, not just the high-end DX9 cards.

AND, it also occurs on some Nvidia and Intel cards. Is that ATI's fault as well??

Unfortunately, their fix doesn't work for most Radeon cards. I still have that specific corruption on my Xtasy 9200; both the rainbowing and the black textures. Definitely not fixed.

I haven't tried 4.5 yet, but I also get the LF's flashing effect on the 9200 with the VisionTek Cat 4.1, and the ATI Cat 4.4, and the Omega Cat 4.3.

Terrific!!!!

Now all I have to do is pony up 400 bucks for a 9800 and I'm all set!

[/B]

Though this probably isn't much consolation, 128MB Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pros are about half the price you quote, at US$209.

ATI (Sapphire) Radeon 9800 Pro w/128MB 8X AGP @ NewEgg.com

That's still $200 dollars for *one* game. I've no need for it otherwise, my *perfectly fine* Radeon 9000 can run the latest and greatest just dandy (Hitman Contracts with a POST-filter looks amazing).

LF

That is indeed a good price Chrom. But it's only 128mb, and it's still ATI. You'd have SL compatibility problems even with this card and Cat 4.5, as people with 98/9700 cards have reported in other threads.

I'm with LF on this one. My 9200 runs everything else I use very well. If I were to upgrade though, it would definitely be an Nvidia card.

Time to fish or cut bait: SL claims compatibility with Radeon 8500+. It's time to deliver on that promise or admit that the client is really only compatible with Nvidia (which would be no surprise given that LL and Nvidia are marketing partners, and that SL is developed on Nvidia platforms, and that ATI's implementation of OpenGL isn't up to par).

i have to say that the only remaining issues with ATI on second life seem to be some slight stability problems with some of the shaders. and a slightly less common texture corruption bug that *may* have been fixed by ati in 4.5 (i haven't seen it since upgrading to 4.5 at least)

The other 6-8 issues over the months i've documented and bug reported have all been fixed, many by LL themselves, a few by ATI.

FIXED:

All FSAA problems (by LL in 1.3)
'Classic' (green with black bands) texture corruption (by ll in 1.3.2-1.3.4)
discohappyfunpartyworld color flashes (by LL in 1.2.x)
avatar vertex shader makin neon people (by LL in 1.3)
reflection mapping (by ATI in cat 4.5)
ATI related stability issues (by LL all through 1.2 and 1.3)
mouse selection lockup issues (by LL in 1.3)
HUGE performance problems (by LL in 1.3)


i don't have that many qualms stating that the remainder of people having trouble are generally having thermal/voltage/chipset/ram/agp driver/spyware issues

i have a 9800 pro, runnin on an nforce2 with really high end corsair ram essentially unchanged for about 6 months now.. and i've been watching as LL has slowly but determinedly fixed bug after bug since the mid 1.2's (when LL had a turnaround in policy when it came to ATI support)

I can very solidly say today that there are not are *NO* remaining 'ati specific' SL bugs that i have been able to find other than *possibly* a slight stability degredation when using shaders. All of the big problems have been fixed and ATI cards finally rival their nvidia bretheren in SL performance.


I've been talkin with LF alot and i think it is *VERY* likely the problems he has been having are related to his specific card and a potential problem with his cards' GPU, most likely thermal, but mabye voltage related


*many* of the other people having stability issues will find that a 'side by side' install of xp/2k will fix whats been going wrong with them. (previous repeated crashings with earlier versions of SL or other things can damage an XP system to the point of serious instability in SL, a fresh install on the exact same system may infact prove impeccably stable) (this happened to me in the 1.3.2-3 range)



another severe problem is people with 'under spec' 3rd party ati cards... these cards run 'okay' in most (far *FAR* less demanding) games but simply lack adequate cooling/voltage to run even stock speeds in SL. My guillemont/hercules 9800 pro for instance had a relatively under-whelming cooler that was causing me troubles back in the late 1.2.x's... replacing its cooler with a much *MUCH* more capable giant heatpipe solution from zalman solved alot of my problems there.

How I wish that were true. You may have been talking to LF, but you haven't been talking to me or the many other people who still report severe ATI compatibility problems.
To repeat myself: my Radeon 9200, which is a cool, low-voltage chip to begin with, is already overcooled. My hardware is 110% stable. I low-level format my hard drives and reinstall Windows once a month, and massively bench test for stability. There is no, repeat NO, problem with my system.

A simple search of the forums will show you that a lot of problems still exist even on high-end Radeons with Cat 4.5. Which leads to a point so obvious that I can't believe it needs to be said; just because problems are claimed to be fixed, or may have been fixed for your particular card on your particular platform, is no basis for a blanket generalisation that everything is fixed. It damn well isn't:

Where's the AGP?????? It still can't be used. I verified this by hacking the configuration to turn it on, and it still slows the program to a crawl. How can you possibly claim that ATI cards are up to Nvidia level if they can't use AGP?

The 9200 at default settings absolutely still has the classic green/black texture banding corruption with all versions of Cat including 4.5.

FSAA absolutely causes massive instability on most Radeons, including the 9200. Specifically, the crash to desktop problem was never fixed. Nor, were the spontaneous reboots and instantaneous client shutdowns.

There are a host of lighting/Gamma problems that have never been fixed.

Avatar Vertex program is still not fixed for ATI.

If you could see my personal Help area, you'd see that some of the items you've mentioned are still listed by the Lindens as Unsolved. And many which are listed Solved are not; they've simply been passed on to the Developers.

Basically, virtually none of the things you've listed were fixed across the board. Some fixes for the 9800/9700 have worked for some people, but not for others. And the last 3 client releases have introduced a slew of new bugs on top of the graphics problems; again a simple forum search will verify this.

Oh, and BTW, if everything is already fixed, how come ATI and LL are still working on fixes for future releases? I've asked, and they say they are. Perhaps you should tell them not to bother, eh?
________

except you could have a bum card.. and frankly i don't buy a massive bench test for stability on a fresh install every *MONTH* i mean... come on... lets all be rational here... im sure you're having problems im not being dismissive believe me, i just think that in a modern computer, the ability of even seasoned pros (which i consider myself) to have the most simple mistakes or quicky hiccups should never be under-estimated.

For awhile i have had a usb2 5 port card in my system... but i kept gettin crashes to desktop in SL... after some workin around i ended up takin out that card and movin it to a different pci slot and it never happened again... why did it happen in the first place when ACPI is supposed to eliminate such finnicky behavior? no idea... but it happened.


And thats just the tip of an iceberg... one of the biggest problems i've seen with SL has been with nforce2 setups because by in large they have hot-running north bridges that are inadequately cooled by cheap little passive heatsinks. Normally its not an issue but SL does a *HUGE* amount of texture swapping over agp which strains northbridges much more than pre-loaded level games like quake derivatives.

Will *ANY* game ever be 100% stable on 100% of systems? hell no! even console games now are increasingly fraught with crash bugs and strange unrecoverable errors. *HAS* SL been getting better and better in regards to ATI support? hell yes!


is blaming ATI's driver support on all of the problems futile? damn straight that is too.. thats where LL was 4-6 months ago and SL was *nigh unplayable* on *ANY* ati system with huge gaping rendering holes and obvious problems.


for one example you say fsaa is unstable? heh sorry bub.. its *VERY* stable... has no bearing on stability at all actually, never has. Now thats not to say FSAA doesn't destabalize yer system... because FSAA does push the card much harder, especially older/more primitive cards like 9000's and 9200's... specifically the cards internal ram is pushed much much harder in fsaa modes on them and *IF* your system is actually destabilizing, i would reccomend you take a look at yer card... it may very well have over-heating or under-performing ram (which would also explain texture errors)

I think the only graphical glitch I currently get is the 'green / black AV faces at various distances'.

Although completely disabling AGP can't be good for performance.

Ok...I've got a Radeon 9700, just upgraded to 4.5 drivers and I still don't get shiny.....nope...no chrome at all. What am I doing wrong? System is a P4 3.06, with 1Gb RAM.

How did you manage to get chrome Chromal?

Charlton

edited to correct spelliing - doh!

In the Preferences window (in the View Menu), in the Display tab there is an option for 'Object Bump'. You need to enable this to show shiney objects.

Well I took the plunge and upgraded my Catalyst from 3.1 to 4.5. So far no problems that I saw in other versions since 3.1... but then again, no improvement. I still have a problem seeing textures (is that even an ATI problem?)... they're still blurry from certain angles and clear when I change angle.

Shiny works, but I'm afraid to try avatar vertex, and I can't enable AGP. They still have work to do as far as I can tell.

Not sure what it is you don't buy, but I wasn't trying to sell you anything.

If you mean that what I'm doing in terms of system maintenance sounds like paranoid, overkill - the fact is that I have other things besides games on my system. I use my home system for business and financial purposes, and it's reliability is crucial. I've had crashes in the, somewhat distant, past which were destructive to the point that it took days to completely restore the system, applications, and data. And again, I do it as much for security as anything else.

So, yes, I'm quite paranoid about redundant backups and maintenance. But it's worth it; it's been ages since I've had a crash that took more than 30 minutes to totally recover from. And the whole maintenance process is pretty much automated, and requires no babysitting.

As for testing the GPU/CPU stability, I use OC-type artifact checkers to stress the card to it's limits and see if I can force any problems. I can't.

Your position that FSAA both can't and can destabilise a system is a bit, er, interesting. If you're implying that it doesn't have an effect on high-end Radeons' stability, I've no experience with those cards, so I can't comment. Turning it off was Colin Linden's suggestion many months ago, as a fix for certain freezes and crashes. And it worked. I still have a totally reproducible way of crashing the client on my system: turn on FSAA; log on to SL; open the Windows color picker dialogue from within Edit or Appearance; crash. No other graphics feature causes this particular problem. Once again, the GPU isn't overheating, and I use Aida32 to check the video card's actual memory throughput to specs, and it's exactly what it should be. If you know a more precise way to measure it, please share.

Totally agree with you that railing against ATI is about as productive as a DIY lobotomy. I'm sick of it, and am quite seriously shopping Nvidia cards. Guess you could say that the SL/Nvidia partnership is going to be lucrative for them.

I posit FSAA has no effect on driver software stability... if you *DO* get unstability from enabling fsaa from everything i've seen its UNIVERSALLY been a hardware problem with the card, or in the case of some games (like SL prior) a specific incompatability with one of the openGL buffers (usually selection as SL's problem originally was)

Hardware issues with fsaa generally result from overheating *RAM* not gpu (tho in many low end video cards they annoyingly use the gpu heat 'spreader' to literally spread its heat allllllll over the otherwise usually cool running ram chips bah)

1:1 replacements with the same chipset card (either identical, or from another manufacturer) have always resolved them in the systems i've seen go south that way


as to a full wipe/restore if yer restoring and not installing from scratch the problem is if there is an issue with a driver or windows registry setting on the restore image well.. yer outta luck cause every 'clean' install ya do is already good'n mucked up (happens where i work far too often )

i understand for ease of continued operations on a business machine images are the *only* way to go... however for debugging instillations of game systems... they're nigh useless since you're starting from what *could* possibly be a screwed up source



as to yer blurry textures cubey that could very well be the ram setting in SL, or your mipmap setting in the ati drivers may be set for performance over quality...

in *GENERAL* cubey unless yer usin aniso filtering on the textures... their quality will degrade 'super' proportionally to the angle you view them at.

Thanks Kelly...I now have shiny and...omg...things look so different! I never knew my motorboat was shiny and, as for the Abbotts Aerodrome float plane...wow!

Gonna need to revisit everything now, to see how it was meant to look. Thanks to LL and ATi.

You may well be right, eltee. Possibly there's something glitchy about this particular card that only SL triggers.

Anyway, I've been running 4.5 for a few days and it seems smooth with all my other apps and games. So I'm going to cross my fingers and install SL. If it's still real buggy, I'm gonna grab an Nvidia card on eBay and see what happens.

RE: your other point. Yes, it's true that I only do full, fresh install of Windows twice a year. But I try to keep the Reg as clean as possible, using both Regedit and several cleaning utilities...of course, some rotten entries are bound to slip through. Perhaps life isn't perfect after all.