ATI Problems & VPU Restore - Lindens please read.

I've been having a TON of crashes with my ATI Radeon 9700 (non-pro) 128MB Card. I've managed to stop a lot of the crashing, and I thought my observations might help...

I very seldom crash when not in build mode, and the occasional crash that does happen out of build mode usually closes the program fully, but doesn't affect windows. I report those with the Crash logger, and all is fine. But when I go into build mode, things get much worse...

When rotating around prims that I'm working on, SL locks up on my a LOT. Before I updated to the latest catalyst drivers, when this happened I had to reboot. Now that I have the latest drivers that ATI put out, I have a VPU Reset option enabled. When SL Locks up now, the ATI Software attempts to reset the card. I've noticed it will normally reset 4 or 5 times unsuccesfully and then completely freeze up, causing me to reboot.

What I found out last night is that when the screen flickers on the VPU reset, if I use my mousewheel to quickly scroll out from what I was working on, the reset will work and SL will start responding again. Everything then seems to work fine until the next lockup. These locksup tend to happen about every 2 minutes or so while building.

So if you have an ATI card that supports the VPU Reset, turn it on. And Turn off the option about reporting, because that messes things up. After you do that, if SL locks up, wait for the flicker. When the screen goes black w/ a VPU reset, scroll back from whatever you are doing, and hopefully the game will start responding again.

Man, ATI cards produce beautiful scenes, but they can be so buggy sometimes! Hopefully either SL or ATI will get this resolved soon!

I have very similar problems with my ATI 9600pro w/128mb. The computer is 2.4Ghz w/800FSB and 1GB RAM. Hyperthreading is enabled. I can generally hang-out around my land-plot for hours without a crash, but when I venture too far, I get consistent crashes. At one point, it was so bad I could last only 30-seconds after TP'ing to Ahern.

But, the most frustrating problem is the building crashes. Building/Scripting is what I enjoy the most about SL, but unfortunately, I can't build for extended periods without crashes. Sometimes I can go maybe 10-minutes, but it seems that once I crash while building, constant crashes follow every 3-4 minutes. I don't believe it's entirely related to building, though... only that when building there is a lot of camera movement - zooming/rotating.

This crashing while in camera-look has happened ever since day one for me. I believe it first happened when I was given a very small object to attach to my Av... instead, I placed it on the ground and needed to zoom-in to find it... that caused my first crash.

Other rendering issues I've noticed since day one are the polygon flashes... those stretched/torn pieces that seems to come from objects way in the distance. And prims that are ghosted, deleted but stay rezzed until a relog (though I figure this isn't graphics-related.)

However, I don't believe these are solely issues with ATI's drivers. I think that maybe SL was coded more specifically for Nvidia... possible tweaks that make it run better for their cards could cause the troubles with ATI cards. Nvidia had the greater market share. It's interesting to note that Intel has nearly double the market share of ATI and Nvidia, though most of their chips are geared toward office apps. and other general use rather than 3D gaming.

Edit:
Out of curiosity, I'll move a temp. sensor from my HDD to my ATI proc. tonight to see what the temp. is when crashing. The CPU runs 35-40 celcius. What's the high end on a video card before it crashes?

Ever since the 1.4.10 update, SL has been crashing a lot more - both application crashes as well as freezing my entire pc so i have to powercycle.

This happens while moving around, or even while not doing anything - just looking at the chat history.

My system:

AMD XP 2700+
512mb RAM
Windows XP SP 1 with all critical updates
ATI RADEON 9600 SE AGP w/ 128mb
Driver Version 6.14.10.6458

(I just had the pc-freeze happen twice in a row, the second after i'd been logged into SL less than 1 minute)

This is *quite* frustrating.

- Neo

For the record and curious-minded,

I tried my best to give the GPU a good workout in SL... turns out ALT-CAMERA heats it up fairly well. Zooming in as close as possible and then rotating gave me a temp of 50c, and zooming all the way out to look down on the ground below pushed to 51c.

Flying didn't do as much damage as I expected, upper 40s... flying higher lowered the temp. Standing around gave me temps around 44c.

However, I did finally crash in a snow sim while walking... at 46.5c

that's with the sensor taped to the ATI heatsink, as close as I could get it to the GPU without blocking the heat transfer... so actual temps could be +10c, still not bad. Typing this post yields a temp of 36c

Yeah, my Radeon 9500 Pro card tends to crash the most while doing alt-rotates around objects, especially if the camera is locked on the object and it is moving. 9500/9600/9700 is basically the same architecture.

QUESTION: What is your draw radius? Dropping it may give you more tolerance on fast rotation.

The latest ATI patch definitely resolved a few texturing problems, but the bottom line is that when you spin the camera rapidly, you're loading a whole new set of data to your video card. Of course it's no excuse; it shouldn't crash.

Seems to be the theme of the Radeon series... great performance with the occaisional bizarre irking bug.

(I'm running Asus A7V8X mb, athlon XP series CPU, 1 gig pc3200 ram, 333FSB.)

-Hiro Pendragon
Serving SL from Varney 200,200

With all the talk about the Radeon cards not working in SL, it makes me feel a little bit better about my situation.

I have a 9600XT 128Mb, and I've been experiencing the same weird lockups as well. Most of the time the system requires a powerdown.

Has anyone noticed in their display setup in SL if the AGP option is checked or not? Mine is grayed out, yet I'm using an AGP card.

Might be part of my problems right there. I am using the latest Catalyst drivers.

DO you have AGP acceleration turned on?

If so, turn it off.

Do you have the latest drivers for EVERYTHING? Motherboard, AGP chipset, sound, BIOS, etc.

Try those out.

LF

In SL? If so, I can't, the option is grayed out for me, and is unchecked, so I can't select it either way.



I'll check on the AGP chipset, but all other drivers are up to the latest packages. Bios is as well.

The AGP is usually the culprit, at least it was for me. Sometimes the latest drivers are hard to find.

LF

Ooh! New Catalyst Drivers released today - 4.8

Seems they've added several features:
--improved VPU recovery
--possibly better support for my 53" HDTV via DVI
--and some sort of geometry instancing as quoted below

provides assistance when a game has to render many objects where the geometry is highly similar. Geometry Instancing allows the VPU to create multiple objects from a single geometric model, rather than passing an entire new model for each item on the screen. This increases the rendering speed of images such as leaves, or grass.

here's a link to the complete notes:
http://www2.ati.com/drivers/Catalyst_48_release_notes.html

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for sharing this. Whenever I build or chat, I am constantly changing my camera angle, and experiencing these freeze/crashes with my 9700 Pro.

I am *not* alone out there!

That will teach me to build with the camera angles. Shame on me!

Here's to a fix in the near future from either SL and/or ATI.

*Heads up Lindens! Time for Mr. ATI Fix-It Person to log back into SL and try these out to find out why we're freezing and crashing!*

I'd liked to chime in and agree that the ATI issues are TERRIBLE! With most features enabled SL will lock my laptop up solid. With all the features disabled (aniso, bump, lighting, shadows, etc), I constantly get a memory read error that crashes SL, but does not lock the entire PC. I have 2 laptops with ATI cards and they both have lockup/memory read errors.

Here is the error:
Description:
Application popup: Second Life: newview.exe - Application Error : The instruction at "0x693fe27b" referenced memory at "0x00000030". The memory could not be "read".

Click on OK to terminate the program

I can only go for few minutes until SL crashes! PLEASE FIX ASAP!!!!!! HELLLLLLP!

update: newest Radeon drivers appear WAY more faulty than the last ones. I am seriously considering uninstalling and putting back in July's drivers.

Problems appear to be with transparencies in front of transparencies.

-Hiro Pendragon
Serving SL from Varney 200,200

So far, I have not had any problems at all with freezing or crashes (knock on wood).

I have all features enabled and do quite a bit of flying, building, camera angles, etc.

I just upgraded my Radeon 9800 XT (256MB) drivers to the latest available at the ATI site (4.8 I believe) and so far so good.

The only weird problem I have experienced was yesterday. I was flying and kept bumping into something I could not see. I tried flying every direction and could not go anywhere. After about a minute or so, the whole image came up and I ended up being inside the demolition derby compound which is like a huge cage, in case you haven't seen it. I have not clue as of how I ended up inside it, as it only has a small entrance at the top. I could see all surrounding buildings and landscape, just not that building.

A problem with my video card or SL? I don't know.

I might try back that way to see if experience the same problem.