Welcome to the Second Life Forums Archive

These forums are CLOSED. Please visit the new forums HERE

1.3.4 *significantly* less stable for me

eltee Statosky
Luskie
Join date: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 1,258
04-14-2004 06:19
I run a 9800 pro and i'm used to a little SL weirdness now and again... but this new behavior is TOTALLY novel to 1.3.4, i got it within 5 minutes of runnin the new SL version, and have *NEVER* seen it before

Theres still the old round of ATI crashes every so often... not a huge deal.. the generic windows errors, yeah those haven changed.

What has changed is now every 10-15 minutes the thing crashes the graphics card now. But whats really weird is this is brand new for 1.3.4... and *alot* of the time the ati vpu recover actually works... and SL keeps running.

What'll happen is suddenly SL appears to lock up. The mouse is stuck within the bounds of the windowed application... can't be moved outside the SL frame. My music playing in the background starts skipping then cuts out entirely... after about 20 seconds it starts playing again.... the screen goes black... then comes back... and SL starts responsing again and i get a 'warning your system has gone thruogh a GPU recover etc etc' kind of message... but SL is running totally 100% fine in the background.

Repeat the process every 5 to 10 minutes as needed till eventually SL locks completely.


This is in *NO* way a system thing as nothing has changed on my system since the beginning of april.. and it wasn't doing this before 1.3.4... and its not doing this in any other application... the only thing i can think of is the new no longer red and glimmery avatar vertex shader is unfortunately less than ideally stable inside the GPU itself. Fortunately ati's drivers are versatile enough now to detect the card has stopped responsing and restart it without *TOO* many ill effects to the system.. tho it can't be a good thing either.

I'll attempt to run with the avatar vertex shader off tonight and see if it continues to happen. But *SOMETHING* has obviously changed for the worse when it comes to ati stability so whatever was changed between 1.3.3 and 1.3.4 needs to be gone over with a pretty fine toothed comb
_____________________
wash, rinse, repeat
Zygo Slate
The voices in your head..
Join date: 1 May 2003
Posts: 47
I must concur with my talented colleague
04-14-2004 08:09
I agree that I,also ,am seeing some convoluted actions in SL. 'Little " inconveniences like missing inventory, freezing as we used to, but without the group of people, and a new one-tajing an inordinate amount of time in logging off (tock,...... Tick........Tock- roll over-...3:01.........roll....3:02Tick......
.....twist.......roll...3:04 (must have dozed off a while)! My problems (so far) have been relegated to the previous versions and have improved. My puter is completely different than eltee's, but pretty fast also. Lindenpersons, please let us know what's going on.Too many people joining at once; a few more servers necessary? Just curiousier and curiousier.

From: someone
wash,rinse,repeat

Ever read directions on a moist toweltte?: Tear open, unfold towelette, gently wipe hands, dispose of towelette.

The dumbing down of America quietly continues.....
Julian Fate
80's Pop Star
Join date: 19 Oct 2003
Posts: 1,020
04-14-2004 09:06
At least it doesn't say, "Do not eat. Do not use while sleeping. Not to be used as a floation device."

My favorite part is, "Gently wipe hands". Without that I'm picturing someone violently grinding a moist towelette into their hands, teeth clenched and blood flying.
Chromal Brodsky
ExperimentalMetaphysicist
Join date: 24 Feb 2004
Posts: 243
04-14-2004 11:32
Hmm, very strange. Well, I can't provide any suggestions, but perhaps this will help eliminate possibilities. SL runs with stability (16x anio, 6x FSAA, Avatar Vertex) as a maximized window on my 1280x1024x32 head in a dual-head setup. This is with the following:
  1. SL NewView.exe client v1.3.4
  2. ASUS A7N8X-E (nForce 2 Ultra 400)
  3. AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (retail heatsink + fan)
  4. OCZ 2-3-3-6 PC3200 512mB(x2) (running at 2.5-3-3-6 in dual-chan mode.)
  5. Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (8X AGP) w/Catalyst 4.4
  6. WinXP, fully patched/updated
  7. WD 160GB SE (8MB cache) PATA/1xx drive.


Hope this is somehow helpful.

Grasping at straws, eltee, is your PC on a power conditioner?
eltee Statosky
Luskie
Join date: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 1,258
04-14-2004 11:56
From: someone
Originally posted by Chromal Brodsky


Grasping at straws, eltee, is your PC on a power conditioner?


actually its on an on line UPS so yeah my powers fine

this specific freeze up and call ofthe vpu recover while SL continues to run has *NEVER* happened before in the 6 months i've been playing SL

not *ONCE*

sure its crashed in other fun ways

but this had never happened before

1.3.3 ran the whole time never happened once, on the same exact system/drivers.. *nothing* changed between my running 1.3.3 and 1.3.4 other than newview.exe

and 1.3.3 ran for the most part okay... never having this error while 1.3.4 now it locks the system and forces a vpu recovery something like once every 5-10 minutes

*SOMETHIN* in the sl code changed thats causing this
_____________________
wash, rinse, repeat
Doug Linden
Linden Lab Developer
Join date: 27 Nov 2002
Posts: 179
04-14-2004 13:22
eltee,

I believe that after the ATI driver faults (and causes a VPU recovery), it's very unlikely that the driver is in a safe state afterwards. I believe that upon getting a VPU recovery, if you don't restart your system immediately afterwards you may likely end up with repeated crashing.

Let me know if disabling the avatar vertex programs helps at all. The only change that was made to the rendering code in 1.3.4 was to fix a bug that would result in the avatars being covered in flashing red/yellow triangles when vertex programs were turned on running on ATIs - there may be other issues with vertex programs that have NOT been fixed (either ours or drivers).

I would also try uninstalling and reinstalling Second Life in order to clear out all the cache files. While I can't think of anything in the cache which would cause driver related problems (they would normally cause crashes in our app WELL before we push data to the driver), it IS possible.

Oh, one more thing. If you were crashing at a relatively high rate before the 1.3.4 update, it may be possible that you DO have a hardware/driver related problem that simply changed because of a minor rearrangement of code paths.

And then there's all the standard hardware debugging stuff (does your power supply handle the load, is your cooling sufficient, etc.). That stuff's a pain to go into detail with, though. :)

- Doug
eltee Statosky
Luskie
Join date: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 1,258
04-14-2004 13:38
From: someone
Originally posted by Doug Linden
eltee,

I believe that after the ATI driver faults (and causes a VPU recovery), it's very unlikely that the driver is in a safe state afterwards. I believe that upon getting a VPU recovery, if you don't restart your system immediately afterwards you may likely end up with repeated crashing.

Let me know if disabling the avatar vertex programs helps at all. The only change that was made to the rendering code in 1.3.4 was to fix a bug that would result in the avatars being covered in flashing red/yellow triangles when vertex programs were turned on running on ATIs - there may be other issues with vertex programs that have NOT been fixed (either ours or drivers).

I would also try uninstalling and reinstalling Second Life in order to clear out all the cache files. While I can't think of anything in the cache which would cause driver related problems (they would normally cause crashes in our app WELL before we push data to the driver), it IS possible.

Oh, one more thing. If you were crashing at a relatively high rate before the 1.3.4 update, it may be possible that you DO have a hardware/driver related problem that simply changed because of a minor rearrangement of code paths.

And then there's all the standard hardware debugging stuff (does your power supply handle the load, is your cooling sufficient, etc.). That stuff's a pain to go into detail with, though. :)

- Doug



thanks for the response doug... i generally jus wipe the application data for SL after each release, so the cache etc should be fresh.

I really think theres a good chance its somehtin with the shader... and even a reboot it generally hits that vpu recover within 5-10 minutes.

Funny thing is i played ut2k4 after one of the initial lockups it gave me.. for about 3 hours.. an everything was fine.. so i don think the ati driver itself was rendered inherently unstable... just the SL app.


As to the usual de rigeur of all the tech stuff essentially everythings, up to date... more than 24 hour burned in.. monitored.. sufficiently powered and on line voltage corrected..

honestly i think the general crashes i'm having are as likely to be network issues as graphics related... i know theres a particularly annoying problem with my local cable where every so often a few bad bits slip into the outgoing stream... aka i'll say "hey guys" and it comes out 'heP ys'

its fairly intermittent and happens outside of SL too (and on several different machines) so its not SL scrambling those bits or anything don worry...

I'm not sure if that hampers the overall stability of SL but i know occasionally remote desktop *in* to the machine does crash from it so i guess its not impossible

Again thogh thats been persistant for months and is fairly infrequent so i'm not gonna really try and go into that here...

this system hiccup then VPU recovery thing coming after a prolonged SL freeze where the mouse cursor is 'trapped' inside the SL window tho happened i'd say 25-30 times in the last day to SL, not to any other 3d application... and has *never* happened before... so i'm pretty well inclined to think that seems to be a prolem pretty well specific to 1.3.4

i'll try with all the shader features disabled tonight and see if that runs any smoother.. tho its never scientifically 'provable' to not find something.. given the frequency it was happening last night i'd wager even an hour without it doin that would be fairly authoritatively lockin that down to the shader crashing
_____________________
wash, rinse, repeat
Anu Statosky
Registered User
Join date: 15 Mar 2004
Posts: 20
04-14-2004 20:11
Has anyone else seen it delete your Mozilla bookmark file when it crashes your computer?