The Radeon Issue (or crashing)

Is it really a Radeon Issue?

Specifically, a 9700 issue?

I have a 9700.... and I'm using the latest cats on ATI's site... it doesnt crash for me (except when I exit, rarely...).

There ARE visual anomalies with certain options applied (for example, if I enable bumpy water without enabling bumpy avatars.. or avatars without water... the sky goes white, wtf...)... but not crashings... in fact, with the right (semi-ugly) settings, no visual anomalies occur anymore.

So if its crashing, I would have to suggest that its not purely the 9700.

Why?

This is a 'clean room' machine. I use it to develop on. It has as few running processes, drivers, and other bits and pieces installed on it as possible.

I sweep it daily for virii.
I sweep it daily for spyware using SpyBot SD (get it if you don't have it, it will save you a ton of problems).
I run a thick firewall on it, with custom settings.
I monitor the processes running in the background with paranoia bordering on the insane.
It has to be a CLEAN computer becuase if a game crashes on me, and its one I wrote, I need to know that it was the game, and not Happy Jack's Amazing Popup Blaster 2000 that killed it.

But anyways, my point is, yes, there are glitches, but I"d be careful about blaming the radeon for it immediately - there are systems (like mine) for which the radeon 9700 does NOT crash on, implying that its something else on the system.

For example, the 9700 requires a large amount of power - what is your power supply? The power demand becoems HUGE when a game like SL comes along. There is no game out there that strains a video card like SL does. This machine has a 450 watt power supply, and that seems to be enough.

A general rule of thumb that holds almost all (but not all) of the time, learned while developing other games:

If it BLUE SCREENS its definitely, 100%, absolutely a driver bug. Thats what driver bugs LOOK like. Thats the very purpose of the blue screen.

If it locks up and its running in windowed mode, and you cant kill it even with alt-f4 or ctrl-alt-delete, its a driver bug.

if it VISUALLY GLITCHES its probably a game bug. It could be a driver bug.

So what is causing the crash? my argument is its not ONLY the 9700. Because the only card I have inside this computer is a video card.

And in that setup, it doesnt crash.

It might be the way the card doesnt play nice with other devices. Or the way it interferes with things. But I dont think its the card itself, alone.

If you are having problems, I would check the following
* Spyware sweep. Google for SpyBot Seek And Destroy. Its free, and open, and works great (Better than ad-aware, IMO).
* Virus Sweep. Try http://www.trojanscan.com (free). htpp://housecall.antivirus.com (free).
* Running task sweep. Press CTRL-ALT-Delete (win2k/XP) and check running tasks. If something realy goofy is there, investigate.
* Check Power consumption. Ensure that you have enough power flowing in your computer. This is one of those BIG problems that a lot dont know about. 300W and even 350W is NOT ENOUGH ANYMORE. Especially for the top of the line video cards when you are torturing them with SL and have in addtion some extra drives and a CDR and a Burner or whatever.
* Check heating. Ensure that the card is not overheating. Feel the top of your computer case. Feel near the bottom of it . The top shouldnt feel like a kettle about to boil, when the bottom feels cool.
* Think about other cards running along with the video. Sometimes, SB-Live cards liek to be in certain slots, or they mess with the bus.

HOWEVER.

There are (obviously) some bugs here. The bumpy water is an example. However, some are most likely SL bugs too. But if you are CRASHING or BLUE SCREENING out of the game, consider checking for power consumption and heat, because you shouldn't be having that!

Well its definitly not the 9700 cards only, I've a 9800 and I get many issues, crashing, freezing up, etc. I was even surprised once to get a blue screen, this freaked me out since I'm running XP and had never gotten one before, definitly a driver problem, I run Spybot and Ad-Aware plus Nortan and ZoneAlarm running.

I have a 9700 Pro. Are you saying that a 350W power supply isn't enough? This box has only a hard drive, CD-ROM, and an extra cooling fan.

I really hope that someone discovers and corrects the problems with the ATI cards. I would be more likely to renew my SL account in December if I could reinstall my 9700. For now, I'm stuck with a crappy nVidia FX5200, which has poor performance... but at least SL doesn't crash.

Mezzanine, thanks for the good post.

In addition, I'll post some more Second Life specific information here.

Second Life has been known to trip LOTS and LOTS of hardware and driver related issues. This is often the case on machines where people have not had problems previously.

That being said, as far as we know, on good, solid stable hardware, we don't have significantly worse crashing issues on ATI rather than nVidia.

That being said, here's the best information that I have:

Many of the crashing issues that people have with Radeons appear to be in combination with particular motherboards - in particular, Radeons with Athlons in particular, because they tend to have motherboards with chipsets that are less robust - in particular, VIA chipsets where the 4-in-1 drivers haven't been updated appear to be problematic. Also, sometimes even the BIOS has been know to affect Second Life crashing.

If you are having crashing issues with Second Life, here's what I'd suggest:

Turn down ALL of the settings. Reinstalling Second Life completely on a computer with ATI should put you into default settings, with all features that are likely to cause hardware instability issues off. In particular, using AGP and vertex shaders are our biggest problem areas.

Again, update drivers. Not just video drivers, but AGP drivers, sound drivers, even IDE drivers and BIOS. We have had people have crashing issues be solved by IDE driver upgrades!

We have several known bugs involving using avatar vertex programs on ATI, which cause large amounts of graphical corruption (usually white flashing in the sky and UI). We're working with ATI to investigate these issues - hopefully we'll have figured out what's going on by their next driver release.

Oh, and make sure you send in the crash reports - it provides very useful statistical information for us, if only so we can point at the numbers when we're talking to hardware vendors asking them to work on their drivers! And yes, I DO try and read them all.

- Doug

I've found that turning AGP Acceleration off in SL has fixed my major crashing problems, wish I woulda not clicked it on, heheh. Hope all the crashing didn't effect anything badly, haven't noticed anything yet.