Memory Read Error

Just signed up for the game and seem to be experiencing a major crash. Like.. I can log into the game and sit at the top of the Orientation Island Entrance all day long and chat (like I did with Kex on the Live Help)... however... if I decide to move around or change my appearance, I will crash with:

The instruction at "blahblah" referenced memory at "otherblah". The memory could not be "read".

System Specs:
Laptop System
AMD64 Athlon
WindowsXP
64mb RADEON 9600 Mobility
-> Running the latest OMEGA Drivers
512mb RAM

Sent plenty of error logs.. and per Kex, minimized all my Detail specs for video. Also went and upgraded from stock to Omega drivers on the ATI Card.. Thought I had it fixed for a minute, after reading another forum post and deciding to turn of FastWrite, because I was able to change my appearance and walk around, etc... made it all the way to the "Flying" Tutorial before it crashed again with the same error message.

Please help... not how I intended on spending the 7 trial days in determining if I liked the game. Or, rather, not very impressed at this point.

1) They were MEMORY ADDRESSES. They aren't the same in each crash.

2) It was the suggestion of those on Live Help to post on the forums due that the support@secondlife thing was already abandoned for the weekend and, thus, would not be checked until monday. For your information, I did send an email to them before writing on the forums; it was simply suggested that someone HELPFUL might respond.

Thank you, drive through.

Have you tried the Catalyst drivers?

Sadly, the ATI opengl drivers on the PC are not terribly stable - especially on AMD 64 judging from the crash statistics we generate. I know that ATI can make good drivers because the release builds for my mac never crash.

From what I've gathered from ATI, the Catalyst drivers are built for versions of their Video Cards that are made for Desktop Computers... the Mobility Cards are actually made customizably by each Laptop Manufacturer. The Drivers from OmegaDrivers.net, however, are Mobility Drivers built based on the Catalyst Driver Set... So, technically, I am using the latest Catalyst Driver, it's just in a different form (Omega).

And I don't doubt the stability of the Drivers in any way, seeing as how I play a numerous amount of games and I have yet to experience a crash until this one.


BUT


Onto a more positive note. I was able to make some progress this morning.. Disabled the FastWrite option and bumped the AGP Speed down to 4x from 8x. Was able to play the game for some extent this morning.. a few hours worth of gameplay, actually. Which ended, just now, with a crash to desktop--no error message.

So, there is some progress, at least.

That doesn't mean squat.

SL does things no other game does with graphics. Most games preload textures and models and such, and then just hold them there until the end of the level. SL has to constantly trade out textures and other information. OpenGL can handle this, but in order to fake better speeds, ATI takes shortcuts in their OpenGL implimentations that don't handle such graphics engine behaviours.

Just because "other games" work fine doesn't mean anything, because no "other game" is like SL.

That said... I have no idea if AGP acceleration is an option for ATI users any more, but if you CAN uncheck it, try doing so within SL.

This is important information. It indicates that the problem is probably either hardware or drivers, rather than the SecondLife software.

Missed he'd said that.

Different memory addresses with every crash means the program is crashing in a different spot within the file every single time it occurs. Since it's not occuring repeatedly in one spot, the flaw is not within the file, but external to it. Which means the problem is not within SL. Which means LL can't help (except read your crash reports, which sometimes tell them what part of your hardware is failing).

So yup, like Carnildo says (man that's a hard name to get right manually), the problem is with your hardware, drivers, or some strange external program interfering with SL (I'm betting it's one of the first two, and since you have an ATI card, I'm betting it's your ATI Crap.)

OMG! ATI video cards are excellent cards! Please, Just because LL and ATI cant seem to get together and figure out what's up with the issues, it does not mean ATI are "Crap" cards! FGS! For that matter, does anyone remember the giant Nvidia and Punkbuster issues? Hrmm? Lets see.. Nvidia said it was punkbuster, punkbuster said Nvidia, but, no matter who was blamed, punkbuster enabled games always locked up on Nvidia cards? Sound familiar? C'mon.. Perhaps instead of saying "ATI" is crap, we should turn to LL, and say "Hey, why dont you talk to ATI, figure this crap out". If the video hardware performs fine in applications EXCEPT SL, can we not say that SL is to blame?! Bascially, what I'm trying to say.. Enough ATI bashing, they make great hardware, and as has been proven time and time again, half of what gets blamed on ATI in these forums turns out to be sound/network/motherboard driver issues!

LL and ATI did get together. If you search for the name "ATI" in the find People window, you might see one or two avatars around still. SOME good came of it (ATI released a driver fix or two), but not everything was solved.

ATI makes great hardware. No doubt about it.

However, the ATI Windows driver team decided to make some shortcuts in their opengl implementation which is frequently exposed by Second Life.

Data points we have related to this issue:

* ATI runs many games well.
* Second Life crashes in the ATI drivers on windows
* Second Life runs great on OSX with an ATI


I conclude that since OSX's UI is written on top of opengl, the OSX driver writers spent more time making sure the implementation was correct, and the windows driver writers spent more time making sure it ran quake 3 as fast as possible.