That's it, F*** Radeon cards

Okay, I've had it. I've always had small wonky problems with my Radeon 9500 card, and althought it generally is very fast and smooth, its clear the weird bugs that again and again pop up show the series is just plain broke.

There have been a million threads on this, I wish Lindens would make a thumbnailed post for the Radeon issues in this forum, whatever.

Tonight was the worst, though.

From all the VPU crashes, my card seems to be broken. It crashed HARD and brought down my PC. After messing with it trying to reboot for 30 minutes, I pulled the card and physically reseated it, and got the computer to boot. It then took me uninstalling McAfee virus scanning because from the crashing and such it appears I corrupted my active virus scanning software and the Second Life logs. I had to leave to go to work, but I plan to check if a SL and Catalyst reinstall will help, but I am at the point where I'm going to videotape me smashing up my radeon card and posting it here.

Linden Lab - if we haven't said it enough - there is a serious, SERIOUS problem with Radeon cards and SL. Please come up with some way to circumvent these problems or please announce that you are not able to support Radeon cards in SL. A lot of players have spent a lot of time trying to diagnose and trouble shoot this, but the bottom line is that there are unresolved serious issues.

Frustrated but humble,

Um...... it seems nearly impossible that SL could be even connected to the corruption of your anti-virus program.

It seems one or more of these may be your problem:

- Hardware failure (HD, RAM, Video Card, Motherboard or Power)
- Virus (I spent several hours this last weekend trying to get a virus off my brothers computer that basically nuked his norton AV, and any reinstall therof)
- A space-time anomoly that is tearing apart the insides of your computer.

:-/

I agree with you 110% This is a SERIOUS bug in my book. And not any attemps on either fixing this bug or atleast a change to documentation that specifies Radeon cards are not supported for the few months I've been here, but apparently it's been a problem long before I've been here? So what's up? SL is almost unplayable with ATI Radeons. I would seriously think that something that makes a game nearly unplayable for atleast half of the user base out there would be one of the #1 picks on the "REALLY NEED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS" list.

I have read there is incosistency in the ATI opengl driver. If this is the case and Linden Labs can't do anything about it, it should atleast be mentioned somewhere if for some reason it can't be worked around.

:: HUGS his Gigabyte ATI Radeon 9600pro ::

I have never had any problems whatsoever with mine. I have a $12 slot fan in the next slot down from my GPU and it keeps it nice and cool. Buying an "off" brand or lower quality Radeon card could be the problem. I would stick with Gigabyte or Sapphire, from what I remember they always had the best reviews. A little bit of research goes a long way towards eliminating future headaches.

I can tell you from experience with my old GeForce FX 5600 board, that cheaper is not always better. I bought the cheapest GeForce card I could find and it CONSTANTLY had overheating problems, screen tearing, dropped pixels, skewed textures, you name it. Once I upgraded to my Gigabyte ATI Radeon 9600pro, I have had no problems. Zip. Zilch. Zero.

I have the latest version of Catalyst drivers and it's been nothing but smooth sailing right out of the box for Second Life, Doom 3, various CAD programs, and Unreal Tournament 2004 at it's highest graphics settings (around 75fps usually at 1280x1024 32bpp and all the bells and whistles turned on).

Good luck with your issues Hiro!!

Arti

Yeah, Hiro, I'm not buying that this is a software problem. If your computer failed so badly that it actually needed to be turned off and your video card reseated to work, I'd look at thermal issues before anything else. Check out your power as well, then run through everything else Ama mentions. Check for bad sectors on your hard disk and try another virus scanner to be safe.

Fafnir, not all ATI users have "ATI problems". In fact, many problems aren't strictly the fault of the drivers, but rather, of the combination of the motherboard, video chipset and video driver. PC hardware is really pretty sketchy when you get right down to it.

The problem with putting up a "this is broken on ATI cards" warning message is that it's not a problem that affects everyone, nor would publically fingering ATI's drivers as being shoddy (true though that may be) be likely to improve LL's relations with ATI.

In the course of attempting to diagnose or remedy a problem, an individual developer can say that yes, they believe a certain problem is in ATI's drivers, but for a company to come out and say that ATI's product sucks is to potentially make ATI's willingness to work with LL dry up significantly.

Edit: See? Artillo doesn't have problems.

Backing up what I just said about motherboards playing a bigger role in "ATI" problems than most people might think is Artillo, in this thread. He has an Asus motherboard, and hasn't noticed any "typical" ATI problems. Now, that won't ALWAYS happen, but a quality motherboard like that is more likely to work properly, even with flaky drivers.

Unless I miss my guess, he also has some quality RAM in there as well. Higher-quality components means better and more consistent system performance.

Artillo. Are the cards directly from ATI no good then? I seem to hear a lot of bad stories about overheating with them. I've seen pictures of the newer Radeon cards and it seems ATI is finally getting the hint and putting better cooling systems on their cards. Althought they're kind of forced to with the higher powered cards that are coming out. But yeah they're putting heat sinks on the memory chips now which always seemed to get a little hotter than I thought would be normal.

Catherine. True enough! But also the fact that AGP acceleration is turned off and we as users are not allowed to turn it on. (related to that bug.) As far as problems go. The only graphics related issue I'm suffering from is extremely low framerate (5fps in some cases). I think I've sorted out other problems with minor tweaks. I'm not sure if the low framerate is related to lack of hardware acceleration or something else. You are right about the fact that not everyone shares the same problems though. It could be that they have faster processors and more memory where as I only have 1.7GHz and 512MB RAM and the CPU is bottlenecking on the rendering that the AGP card would normally handle internally. Does that sound plausible?

Yes, SL's CPU-bound. Your CPU speed and memory are the two most important things for SL performance. You can put as fast a video card as you please in your computer, and you'll run a game like Doom 3 incredibly well, but SL will still poke along. Perhaps the Lindens will work on that sometime. So yes, it's very likely that the reasons for your poor performance are your CPU and RAM.

You say you have a 1.7Ghz CPU -- surprisingly, this actually tells me very little. Is it an AMD Athlon? Intel P4? Do you know the core's codename? ("Willamette", "Barton"?) How much L2 cache does it have?

I'd recommend doubling your RAM -- you can get a Samsung 512MB DDR-400/PC3200 module for $80 US these days. I would definitely recommend against running an unmatched pair of DIMMs though. I do, and it's given me no end of trouble. Depending on what CPU you have, I may have other suggestions as well.

As for the question of ACTUAL ATI cards being no good, I don't know -- I've never used a 3rd-party ATI card. Now, were I to actally buy an ATI video card, I would be more likely to buy one made by ASUS than by ATI, simply because I feel a lot more confident about Asus' fab quality. Yes, even over the actual chipset manufacturer themselves.

Edit: I should say, however, that this is purely my personal opinion and that I haven't tested any ATI cards in a very, very long time.

Oh, I'm sorry. Didn't realize anyone would be that interested in my hardware, so I didn't get into details. ;P

CPU is an Athlon XP 2100+ ("Palomino"?). 512K L2 cache. It's running on an ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe mobo. As for the memory.. I have no idea. it's generic and cheap. I am thinking of upgrading it to a gig with something brandname though.

The Palomino doesn't have 512K L2 cache, it has 256. Honestly, I noticed a little difference between the Thoroughbred (256K L2) and Barton cores, (512K L2) but not that much.

You should definitely upgrade your RAM first. I'm not sure if a CPU upgrade would be worth it in your case. You might consider switching CPUs and motherboards entirely, but I don't know that I'm terribly impressed with the 64-bit offerings. I don't think there's any real reason to upgrade from that motherboard, either. It's pretty decent.

His original point is correct though. SL and ATI don't like each other. LL needs to -formally- acknowledge this fact beyond sporadic tech support posts saying that ATI is a bit 'odd' or that changing to NVidia will help, and either remove ATI from the supported cards list or put a warning on the supported cards list page while keeping ATI on there, and start working -with- ATI to track down the problems. I know ATI has worked with them in the past. They can do so again.

Well, that's sort of my point, Moleculor. Depending on the combination of drivers and other hardware in the system, and whether or not the Lindens have inadvertently introduced new bugs into the latest SL build, ATI users can expect any number of things to happen.

ATI cards have never worked as consistently as NVidia's. That's hardly disputable. The thing is, it's not strictly an "SL/ATI" thing, but rather, an "SL/ATI/Motherboard X" thing... or an "SL/ATI/Windows patch 325/PSU Y" thing. There's no guarantee that it will work on all hardware, just as there is no guarantee that it won't. It's just part of the ATI lottery.

The problem is that putting up a message to the effect of "ATI users may experience some problems" would need a number of caveats. Not all ATI users have problems, and not all problems ATI users have are because they have ATI cards. Even now, there are ATI users that simply DON'T have problems. It's not strictly an ATI issue, or strictly an SL issue.

Catherine, I know my PCs... fyi:
1. I did a lot of research before I built this PC to make sure everything would be good. My computer - Asus V7V8X, Athlon XP chip, 1 gig RAM, Radeon 9500 Pro. The Athlon / Asus / ATI combination is supposed to be a good combination.
2. Each driver release from Radeon has posed different wonky problems.
3. Lots of people are complaining about the ATI cards and SL - even if it's a matter of hardware configuration, that's a pretty shoddy product if it's not robust enough to work with many different hardwares.
4. OpenGL is OpenGL. It's an API. It's a standard. If ATI programmed to that, and LL programmed to that, there shouldn't be issues.
5. It may be an overheating issue; that's an interesting theory. Since I'm not worried about damaging the card anymore, maybe I'll unscrew the fan and take a q-tip to it. hehehehe.

6. I've worked with software and computers for years and years. I know how to manage a PC, keep it in working order, use virus software, not put tons of crap on the PC to kill it, etc. It's not user error. I don't post angry frustrated posts about shoddily designed hardware unless I'm at wits end and have tried everything else.

edit:

Catherine, you don't use a Radeon. I've spoken to TONS of people who have had Radeon problems. If there's an easy x-y-z combo, LL has not found it yet. If it's easy to find than LL needs to find it for the sake of a lot of users' sanity. If there's no x-y-z combo, then they need to stop supporting it. Period.

I hear ya Hiro. I have a shelf with about 60-70 games on it, all the "hip cool graphic-intensive" titles dating back about 4 years.

Out of those titles, I've had "difficulties" with only 2 or 3 that ended up being my ATI card. (Freelancer & Mechwarrior - both Microsoft games)... Hell, *DOOM 3* runs perfectly on my ATI Radeon 8500 -- 3 years old!!

I do not believe that the problem is with the ATI cards, it is definately with SL. Or more specifically the way SL is interacting with the ATI drivers. I have 70+ games that I can install and run without any problems whatsoever, and even the 2-3 that give me problems don't crash, they just look bad... only SL causes my VPU recovery to kick in.

I just saved myself a lot of time and ditched my ATI card as soon as possible. Hey, it could've been the tolerances, bad memory on the card, the geomagnetic disturbances caused by my beer cooler, who knows -- all I know is that my 5950 is purring away and I don't get the urge to throw my server case through the window anymore. And when you look at it that way, isn't it much better than spending a lot of time doing research on a product that really should *work* instead of making you do all the scuttling around and tweaking?

I think so.

Seriously though - consider alternatives, which I'm sure you have if you are really one of *us*. (ie, addicted.)

Microsocks targetting computers are pretty wonky, and when aiming at Apple and Linux boxes they often get it wrong and spray spacetime anomalies all over their own customers too.

I think Hiro will just have to live with the friendly fire. You know how responsive MS is to complaints of mistargetting ...

I suggest always turn off fastwrite, and vpu recovery.

With these off I have very very few problems with SL, have never crashed or locked up with a video problem with my 9600XT.

Also never overclock, if I use the overclock feature I will lock up. Other then that, pretty solid with SL and my ATI 9600XT.

Just as a data point for those interested, I mostly only run SL on my mac which has an ATI card installed. I have never had a mac viewer crash in a release build because of rendering problems.

SL exercises exercises ogl edge conditions regularly with constant allocation and dumping of textures and geometry. It is easy to imagine that the windows driver writers over at ATI took some shortcuts which support most games - load one level at a time, and dump everything between levels. Since the entire operating system display on mac is based on ogl, the driver writers would probably spend more time getting it right.

Well...here's my story

Asus A7V Motherboard, Athalon 64 3500+, 1GB"Matched" DRAM, Seagate 100GB Serial ATA

"Real" ATI 9600 Pro...excellent SL peroformance BUT consistant memory errors every 30-90 minutes. Tried EVERYTHHING...AGP Drivers, Video Drivers, BIOS Setup, 3 sessions with ATI Tech Support, etc.

Switched to BFG Nvidia 6800 Card....NO issues whatsoever, slightly better performance (and 2X the cost).

BTW, ATI was very cold to any suggestion of a refund. Won't be buying from them in the future (I had tossed the box..I know...never had an ATI issue before...store won't take back).

Don't know if its software, hardware (I suspect is got to do with AGP timing and SL), but, right now, ATI is out of my machine...and my purchasing....

My suggestion to you would be to loosen up your memory timings. stock isn't always best.... Try 3 CAS, 4, 4, 8 that will take care of any memory errors and you won't notice a drop in performance unless you're reeeeeaaally keen to it.

here's my story....

Asus A7N8X-E
AMD Athlon 3200+
1 GB Corsair XMS PC3200 running in dual channel mode (2.5, 3, 3, 7) very tight.
ATI 9800 Pro stock timing
I've not experience a single problem with it with any program whatsoever... not sl, not doom, not photoshop, 3d stuiod, maya, whatever.. nothing, no problems.

And... and here's the clincher... I get at the very MINIMUM in SL 15fps... about 30 or so on average and while screwing around... 250 or so fps(flying reallly high and looking at nothingness.) The only time I see like 7fps is when there's a problem with the sim itself(cough UMBER cough). I don't really know why everyone is hating on ATI's.

Granted, I'd probably enjoy some AGP accelleration but SL is really all about CPU and memory, not about your video card. It's nice to have the vid card chuggin along when you don't have anythign going on, but almost always my CPU level is at 100%.. that's just the way SL is. If you want SL to run better, upgrade your tickers, kids.

I can attest to ATIs working well on the macs. The image quality on my friend's iBook is amazing compared to what I get. It's horribly slow, but I dont see objects flashing weird colors or any major problem.