The Infamous ATI Texture Banding Problem. FYI Lindens.

I know this is a common problem so I'm not looking for answers here. This is simple FYI for the Lindens.

I recently moved from a ATI 8500 to a Power Color ATI 9800SE card. Happily the once-an-hour crashes have seem to go away but now I'm getting the infamous texture banding problem. I will upload screenshots upon request..

There are two very different forms of this texture banding I noticed.

1. Avatar pink texture corruption. Avatars have magenta blotches all over their bodies in random places. Interesting thing is if you move the camera far away or zoom into mouse look the blotches go away.

2. Going from full screen to windowed or visa vera turns all textures weird. The ground turns red. Most object turn blue or magenta. The frame rate drops to almost 0...

Both problems seem to never effect your avatar though. Through all of this your own avatar displays normally.

After an hour of trial and error I narrowed down the problem to one display options. Avatar Bump Mapping. Turning off avatar bump mapping fixes both problems everytime. Turning it back on reintrouduces both problems everytime.

Kinda sucks because I like avatar bump mapping but I guess I can deal with it.

Ohh yah. I have all other options on. Including local lighting, Vertex and AGP acceleration. These don't seem to be the problem. Only Avatar Bump Mapping. Also I don't have a gradual increase in corruption that other seems to have. It's either there or not... No in between.

Just wanted to let you know.

My system is:

CPU: AMD 2600 XP
Motherboard: Gigabyte with Nforce 2 chipset
Video: Power Color 9800SE 128MB card running ATI 3.9 drivers (Omega drivers have the same problem also)

My symptom is that I get odd green/black overlays on some textures after a while. The simple fix is to go from SecondLife to the desktop, then allow it to restore again. That fixes it for a while, at least. I'm running a ATI Radeon 9700 AIW AGP.

I hijacked one of Sinatra Cartier's threads about this (I think), I'll bump it so you can see what I've come up with. It's either a different problem or it's reacting very differently.

(the thread is named "1.1 texture bug"...although I had mine before 1.1)