ATI support petition?

everything you stated is EXACTLY what's happening to me.
i', running a ATI radeon mobility 9000, on a sony viao pcg-grv670, ati's drivers will not install(without a mod) and sony has NEVER released a driver update for this model laptop, but these points are really off to the side, cuase like you everything worked perfectly fine, until 1.1 which crashed as soon as i opened SL but even that got fixed like 2-3 days later with patch, then boom everything was fine again, untill 1.2, textures turn black, on AV's on objects, on attachment, or do a wierd quiltwork of colors, or even stanger, load some other random texture, that might not even be one in my inventory, hair disappears and skirts and hair disappear.
and agin i must enpasize I had NONE of these issues with 1.1,
now I did try updateing my drivers, used a mod to force them to install, i also tried a 3rd party set of drivers, in both cases, not only did they not fix the issues, but started makeing SL crash MORE often. PLEASE LL I'm begging you please fix these issues, I love SL i even have draged 4 friends into this game from other games, thanks to the new pricing plan. but i can't stand hanging out with them knowing there whereing a great demon av, but seeing, no hair, no skirt, black face and some landscape picture for a shirt.

can't stand haning around them and not seeing hair ?!?!?!?! i can't even get into the game....

maybe i don't know alot about computers... but i know SL worked.... then SL didn't work.... do i updated drivers for the ati... yet SL still does not work

I am getting VERY upset.

It disheartens me to hear that, "that small" can't even get into the game, but I'm starting to not even want to PLAY anymore.

I have had 4 friends sign up for the game, and guess what 2 of them had ATI cards, and guess what again, NEITHER of them are continuing to play. and sadly I don't wonder why. I'm thinking of joining them.

I loved this game, for me it was a "second life" it allowed me to have a creative outlet I'd never had before. and I was truly Addicted. But now, with this ATI texturing bug, I can not enjoy the things I create, or the things other people create, due to the fact that I CAN'T SEE THE TEXTURES, or at least very rarely get to see them as it flickers back and forth between correct, black, CLEAR, or some other texture that isn't supposed to be there.

there's been 4 patches already, each one I was hoping was a fix for this, but they weren't, and I've been holding my breath for the next patch, but I can only hold my breath so long before I die

Here's some added data on the situation:

By cleaning out the cache every time I play, I can avoid these problems for half an hour or so - it seems to be an accumulation of corrupted textures that causes this. The first effect to show up is usually a mis-texture - in other words I'll get the wrong texture depending on how far I'm zoomed from the object in question, and if I zoom in or out further the right one will often reappear.

This is an issue with what's in the cache - if I forget to clean it before signing on, I'll get all the corruption, blackness, missing attachments right away.

yup exact same thing for me, except also if i zoom in on anything or god forbid travel alittle fast, boom blackness, i've been thinking of makeing a batchfile the emptys my catch every time i log in but then i'll be logging in and out all the time, OH WAIT, i already do...... GRRRRR

okay well i found a new bug.. not 100% sure whats causing it but occasionally with glows around lights and one or two other settings all on... a random color gets applied to at least one corner of every *NON AVATAR* triangle on the screen... everything flickers madly around the otherwise wholly clear avatars with colors sure to induce seizures in those prone... bleh... if i figure that one out other than its jus some busted cg compiled shader thats nvidia specific i'll let you guys know.

As to the more info on the texture corruption as far as i have been able to tell it happens almost exclusively on 1024x1024 textures. THIS is why lowering yer available vid card memory seems to 'fix' it, it simply precludes them from loading top 1024x1024 mip0 (source texture), simply choosing the 512x512 mip1 instead. (this is also why when you DO see the texture bug, it only happens whenyer zoomed in (and its using the root texture and not a successively smaller mipmap

i would tend to believe SL's code is simply handling 1024's (and potentially above tho those are few and far between) in a wrong way somehow, on the ati side of the code tree.... given by how they look invariably the same i would assume at some point a pointer to the mip0 root texture of a 1024 somehow ends up pointing to an arbitrary memory location within the ati card, lending further credance that this little hiccup at least is LL's baby, not ati's

Not sure if this is the same problem you're saying eltee, but I just had one tonight where my avatar would turn, white, yellow, light blue, purple, etc, some times fully and sometimes in angles like what happens with Avatar Vertex. However as soon as i moved from one spot to another it stoped, but when i moved back to the same spot it happened again, so maybe local lighting or something is causing this?

Never had this bug before, so not sure whats going on.

i hate doin it but im gonna bump myself here cause too many new people are opening new ati threads and we need to keep stuff concentrated more to one topic if possible

I'm doing a trial, is this related to why everything is so blurry? (9800 pro here as well). I'm thinking of shops and buildings. But also clothing and a few other things. I can tell they really are 3d rendered, but it sort of looks like old "3d rendered by software" games like Doom.

I am on my 7 day trial.

I have an ATI card. As soon as I move- the screen goes black.

If I click the mouse I get a half second of vision.

If i press alt-enter enough it says changing resolution and is visable again and I can fly around but as soon as I click or type anything- BLIND again.

I would really like to try this and give you my money - but I can't put money into a SOLID BLACK SCREEN.

ATI 9500 Pro.

Catalyst 3.10 drivers (latest).

I didn't read most of this thread, but for those running on Cat 3.1 and stuff... have any of you considered the possibility that SL 1.2 runs better on the later Cat versions? I'm on the latest or 2nd to latest, and things are pretty nice here.

this ones, easy.. look up at my starting post... the screen turns black with FSAA on... turn off FSAA and you'll be fine

this ones pretty easy too... stuffs blurry by default cause with ati cards SL defaults to 32 meg video card texture memory.... this forces all the textures in the game to flicker between mip1 (1/2 the resolution of the real texture) and mip2 (1/4 the resolution of the real texture)... set the video card memory higher if you want to see much sharper and clearer textures (128, tho i prefer 256, even on non 256 cards... its alil slower.. but its VERY sharp)

of course you will notice some texture corruption, most notably on the welcome area cement walkway, but eh the sharpness tradeoff is definately worth it

as per what i said in my last post, *SOME* textures are FAR more corruption prone than others... and *ALL* corruption hapens to the source texture, i've never seen it happen to even mip1's

*THE* single most corruption prone is the cement walkway in the welcome area.. it corrupts 100% of the time when i zoom in... literally

zoom in, hold it for 10 seconds, BAM corrupted and it'll stay corrupted all night...

lindens.. if yer out there... could you help me debug this problem?? is there any way i could get a copy of the source texture to have open in a window? i *REALLY* want to see if the source texture gets corrupted as well or if its somethin do do with when the textures is actually rendered on an object.

I bought a new video card 1 month ago... Thought I was getting a great new card, ATI Radeon 9600XT with 128mb onboard.
I started my second life just 3 days ago, though -- wish I'd bought an NVIDIA at this point, but it's too late for that now.

Anyhow: I too am having texture corruption issues and would really appreciate anything that LL would be willing to do to fix 'em.
(note: I don't play a ton of other games, but I can't recall similar issues in any others that I have tried)

Bump for new people with ATI issues.

I've upgraded to the 4.1 drivers; and since then, when using SL, expecially when flying and/or having Photoshop open at the same time -- I'm getting serious crashes with my video card. The hardware options basically shut down and the card goes into the lower-grade "software" mode.

With Catalyst 4.1 --the option of sending the "crash" reports to ATI is defaulted, and I've been sending mine in; along with sending the crash report to SL.

HP is already defaulting to the ATI cards in their PC's and notebooks; Dell is soon to announce that ATI will also be their card of choice for their high-end notebooks.

Lindens, GET ATI WORKING!

Heres my stance

1) Have been a Diehard NVIDIA guy since getting rid of old 3DFX card.
2) Have owned every NVIDIA chipset since TNT2. (Have never been dissatisfied with them, just replaced when they got obsolete
3) Have read great reviews of ATI cards where they shoot past NVidia's cards in performance, this convinced me bo try them
4) Decided to try an ATI card, Was "OK" Great performance but crashed more often than Geforce cards. MUCH more often.
5) less than a month or two of owning ANY ATI cards I went out and bought a new Nvidia card. This goes through several RAGE-Radeon chipsets.

Based on this Side by side comparison over a huge span of time, I will stick to Nvidia. I totally preffer the Nvidia cards, even if they arent the top performers because I rather run slower if its more stable. BUT! I totally support ATI and agree that EVERY game should support them as much a NVIDIA. Why? Because ATI's biggest acheivment (I'm my opinion!) is it managed to make NVIDIA a better card! Not better than ATI because thats a matter of opinion, but better in general. Without ATI, nvidia would probably still be selling geforce 2's right now rather than FX. Competition is great for progress. Just look at how slowly Intel pumped out chips until they got slapped in the butt by AMD. Not too often.

not to mention it is unrealistic to have people buy an ATI and not like it or have problems with it then expect them to buy a new card. Thats NUTS. Yes I do it, But I'm nuts! My wife says so!

Curious. I run two identical machines -- 3.0 P4's, gig memory, same Asus motherboards, same drivers, etc. Only difference -- one has an NVidia GeForce4, and the other has an ATI 9800 Pro. Both have latest drivers.

Been here only 5 days, but originally used the NVidia platform because SL was developed to that spec. However, had crashes and texture loss a lot. Switched to the ATI platform and have had no problems, but the loadup while in movement seems to lag or chug more than with the NVidia.

BTW -- in all graphics environments, the ATI has always been markedly faster than the NVidia, as long as the code has some optimization for both. Got no agenda here, as I own/support both, along with supporting idea of a healthy competition for better products.

Agreed -- LL should support ATI.

** deleted **

well to be fair thats really not an apples to apples comparison... the gf4's were never designed to compete with 9800's, the 9800 pro is about equivalent to the original nvidia 5900... aka MARKEDLY superior to the gf4 series, especially with (SL unsupported ) features like fsaa enabled

Well, you're right and wrong, IMO. If we're talking about raw performance figures, yes. If we're talking about architecture, stability, driver performance, and known issues, etc., then they're comparable from the standpoint of end usage. I was speaking to the crashing/artifacts/chugging thing -- my mistake, should'a been clearer about what I was trying to emphasize.

btw, LL says problem with ATI has to do with OpenGL issues, and suggests we go back to ATI with a complaint. Just heard from ATI -- they say their OpenGL support is superior to NVidia's and that's the problem -- SL OGL is "deoptimized" for NVidia and therefore has stability problems with ATI. Don't buy the ATI explanation, definitely don't buy the LL advice.

basically its been abit of a two way food fight and now unfortunately LL is the one with the kitchen with nasty crud stuck all over the walls, and they're not cleaning it

Hi,

yes linden, please do not only blame the drivers....

ATIs driver politics arent the best, especially their way to deal with linux customers is not a good way, but it can not only be the drivers.. I had drivers 3 month old and i crashed once a day, in the last week it strated to crash 2-3 times a day. After an driver update i still crash 2-4 times a day..

This is not in any way acceptable, espacially if you try to code LSL inside SL.

PLEASE DONT LET US CRASH SO OFTEN, it hurts, even in an damage dissabled sim..

Yours,
Felix McCoy

I have a NVIDIA Geforce 5600, Pentium 4 processor 2gig speed 512megs of Ram. and I am sorry but I am crashing, Lagging incredibly bad, teleports not workin, constantly needing to relog. I have all the latest drivers installed. I do a disk clean up and Defrag the hard drive up to 5 to 6 times a day, and defrag the registry on each reboot of my computer.
this problem is not simply against the ATI cards or drivers. this is happening to everyone. I am convinced that version 1.5.5 is just simply buggy and full of glitches.
My suggestion is to go back to what was working.
I would also have to agree that we need to clean up the problem that we have before continueing on emplimenting all the new and wonderful things that your itching to get into SL.
Shjak Monde