New ATI drivers 7.12 and 8.1 unusable?

So I've been using SL for nearly a year and a half on my laptop fairly successfully.

Then last month I tried the 7.12 driver on my Radeon Xpress 200M.

Wow! 15 fps!!! That's new and wonderful! (And Windlight skies and glow suddenly show too)

Then I TP'd to an art gallery and five-ten minutes later it rapidly dropped down to 0.8 and I couldn't even TP out...

I relogged and it happened again. I tried other SL viewers and it happened. I looked in the texture console and it happens when the top bar turns yellow then red.

So I lowered the hardware memory setting in preferences from 128 to 64 and finally to 32. It just happens faster at lower settings (within seconds at 32).

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

(Just FYI, I obviously went back to 7.11, this came up again because I saw 8.1 had recently come out, so I tried it too hoping whatever was wrong might have been fixed. I also tried an Omega driver today which did it too sadly...)

I don't pretend to understand it, but looking at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Texture_Console, is the discard not happening?

confirmed.

i just installed a completley fresh system.

I 2.6HT, 1.5G RAM, ATI 9800 pro, XP SP2 / SL1.18 5 (3) and actual Windlight also

first of all i installed the newest ati 7.12 and then omega.. all the same:

after few minutes online, especially when other people around, the frametrate was dropping below 1 fps.

after going back to a one year old 6.2 ati driver version everything was much better.. nearly perfect

Thanks Jan, glad I'm not the only one at least! And in further reading, I saw the 7.12 drivers apparently changed to OpenGL 2.1 from 2.0 and found another person who has the problem too... So I made my first jira!

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-4335

I hope you don't mind I quoted what you posted here, but you might want to vote for it there (or watch it) to bring it to their attention?

I mostly haven't had that problem with the 7.12 and 8.1 drivers, and the improved frame rate is a huge plus. But I did have problems like you describe if I turned VBO support on (it's in the hardware settings). VBO doesn't buy you much on an integrated graphics platform anyway (it's at most a 5% frame rate improvement when it works, and a huge degradation when it doesn't), so try turning that off.

I have had to stick with the 7.10 drivers, due to a different issue with 7.12/8.1 drivers, which I mentioned in this JIRA:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3283

Basically Alt Zooming on objects ceases to work for me with those drivers. I haven't tried 7.11, I just stick with 7.10 becuse I *know* they work.

Because of this Alt Zoom issue, I've not even stayed logged in with those drivers more than a few minutes. So I can't say i had the issue you described or not. But there sure does seem to be some issue with the newer ATI drivers.

Thanks for the idea Shirley! I just gave it a try, I normally have VBO on for that extra half an FPS (when you are slow, every bit helps) and didn't recall if I tried turning it off before. Unfortunately it didn't improve anything at all, aside from getting down to 0.5 fps instead of the 0.8 fps I remember from last time, LOL

(and Darien, I intentionally did alt-zoom with 8.1, which worked for me I'm afraid, albeit horribly slow... )

Hmm, I wonder why I consistently have problems then. I guess i'll have to look into other areas (mouse driver?). Thanks for letting me know.

In several JIRA entries, Torley has said that we should stick to 7.10. as both 7.12 as well as 8 are buggy....and that apparently ATI and LL are working on it...

(I still use an even earlier version because 7.10 already gave my computer weird errors.)