Sky has wierd diamonds on clouds

I have been using emerald viewer and tried a different one and same problem, so I uninstalled the card driver and took the card out installed the onboard driver and it works fine, put the card back in and the comp automaticly installs 8.6 and it works fine also but the same problems seem to show up again when I install the ati ccc, even tired installing 9.11 and works fine without ccc.

I'm guess that "ccc" is something like "Catalyst Conrol Center". If that is like the nVidia Control Panel it's not absolutely neccessary to have installed. Most of your video preferrences can be set using the Windows tools for color, bit depth, etc. It's a convenience feature to tweak your settings specific to your card. Anyway, your exercise narrowed your problem down to your video card or the video card driver that is causing your problem. My bet is still a driver issue (as I've said all along). What I would do is remove all traces of every video driver you have installed on your computer........all old ones, new ones, ATI, nVidia, Intel..........everything. You can normally do that by uninstalling them.......but you seem to be having a chronic, recurring problem so maybe a driver cleaner would be in order (I don't normally recommend those type of programs but in your case it may be the solution). I don't have a link to any but if you will do some quick skimming in this section of the forums a couple have been mentioned very recently..........I think Veritiable as posted a link to Driver Sweeper and Chosen Few has linked Driver Cleaner several times.

Once you do that then it's a matter of finding a suitable driver for your system. I'd download several and save them to my hard drive before I cleaned my computer of the video drivers (the graphics that Windows picks up when you have no driver is awful...but it's functional). Then, one at a time, I'd install them.........try them out and if they work quit. If they show the problem unintall that driver (or use your driver cleaner software) and install the next one.......try again. Keep that up until you find a good one.

One point I want to make is something you probably know already. When you remove any driver from your system Windows requires a restart to finish the task of removing it from your computer. When your system boots back up you'll get a "found new hardware" dialog box with a choice to let Windows search for and install a driver........DO NOT let Windows do that. Close the box and install the driver manually.

I had this problem once on an nvidia card. Lowering the sky mesh detail fixed it (the sky problem anyway). Didn;t ave to tturn anything on or off, just lwered the detail till it went away.

Havent see it in a long time though.

I found this exact same problem when I updated my video drivers, ATI do seem to have a habit of bodging the OpenGL portion of the driver.

How did I fix it? I found the original disk that shipped with the video card and ran the installation program from that, hey presto, the stars and jagged textures disappeared and everything became stable again.

I have always been a big fan of ATI, having been in IT for many years, but regretably I have to admit that Nvidia do produce better cards for SL (apart from the one sitting on top of my wardrobe, which absolutely hated SL.

Same problem here. I upgraded to 9.12 drivers and only in SL do I see this issue. I play alot of MMORPG games, though SL isnt really a "game" per-say, but I do not feel it necessary to downgrade the driver just for SL.

I just turned off the Atmospheric Shaders and seems ok now until there is a fix either from SL or ATI.

The 10.1 drivers now released have fixed the issue with the diamond shapes in the clouds.