ati 9800 any workarounds ?

any way to get the game to not crash? anyone ?

Disabling AGP Graphics Acceleration helped me significantly (I barely crash anymore... barely), its under uh Edit - Preferences - Options i think, if not its somewhere under Preferences, if that doesn't help i'm not sure what else to suggest, maybe lowering some options or taking some off.

I have a Radeon 9800 Pro and taking off AGP Graphics Acceleration was the best thing as it was causing me to crash ALOT.

didn make any difference for me.. crash jus bout the same with/without it.. aka about once an hour, and yes everything else is off/minimized too

**deleted**

eltee is it every 50-51 mins? I had a problem with There awhile back where every 50-51 mins the client would just totaly crash on me for no reason, a bunch of people with the same specs also had the same problem, There fixed it in an update though. I haven't had this trouble with SL myself.

Maxx I get that when I first log in and am loading the new area sometimes, other than that nothing, its like a giant disco on every texture. I'm thinking it has to do with loading new areas maybe?

I'm running a Radeon 9800 Pro and haven't experienced any problems since the day I tried to install...at that time, I couldn't even get SL to run. The problem was solved by downgrading to the Catalyst 3.8 drivers, and I haven't had a drop of trouble since. I have AGP acceleration, etc. all enabled and only crash once every couple days.

-Morse

well dependin on how much yer in game that might not mean very much

besides its not all crashing, some of the vertex things and texture things happen to *EVERYONE* its not as hit or miss as crashing is

ATI 9800SE here running fine. I didn't start out that way though. Here is how to trouble shoot it.

First thing is first. Make sure you have the latest drivers for all of your hardware. Pay special attention to video, motherboard, and sound drivers. With your motherboard a BIOS update may also be in order.

Of course I did this, and I still had problems... After a lot of trial and error I found 4 settings that caused me problems.

I had to:

1. Disable AGP
2. Disable Water Ripple
3. Disable all Avatar Bump Mapping and Clothes
4. Set my Video Memory usage to 32MB (even though I have a 128MB card)

Number 1 and 2 stopped the crashes. Number 3 and 4 stopped the rainbow texture glitches.

I also keep Glow around Lights off for cosmetic reasons (looks horrible with my card). I uncheck Anitrophic filtering also because I don't notice a difference with it on and better safe than sorry. I turn off Local tree lighting also, mainly for speed reasons.

If those settings don't work for you try setting EVERYTHING to the lowest possible settings.

If that doesn't work for you check your ATI Control Panel. Make sure everything is on default settings. I've also heard that turning down your AGP speed helps. For example, from 8X to 4X.... Also disabling FastWrites might help.

Personally these settings did nothing but slow me down. I'm running at 8X with fastwrites with no problem.

If none of this is helping then it's probably hardware. People DO get ATI cards to work all the time. And I think the unlucky ones just have the wrong hardware combination. In this case, if you really want to play SecondLife you are going to have to start beefing up your hardware.

Things to try upgrading:

Power Supply - I have weak 350W supply myself but I do not have many addon cards or drives. SecondLife is very power hungry application. It constantly uses the harddrive, CPU, and video to the max. (Shoot for 450W)

Cooling - An overheated computer will be less stable. Try investing in drive cooling. Buy a new highquality copper heatsink for your CPU. Buy fans for any empty fan slots your computer case may have. (Again make sure you have the power to run all of these fans)

Motherboard - New video card in an old motherboard is never good. I personally have a AMD 2600 CPU running in a Gigabyte nForce2 chipset motherboard.

I have to agree with you on hardware. An earlier poster inferred that I must be having *some* of the problems that "everyone" has, but really guys I am pretty happy with things. I attribute a lot of this to having the latest drivers/firmware for EVERYTHING. Also, a stable chipset can help a lot. For example, as a very general rule - Intel chipsets tend to be more stable than the likes of SIS/VIA/etc.

Just my personal experience though...

-Morse

nice try guys but alot of that is ancient history... the real problem is jus SL not doin stuff right with ati. Its definately not a chipset thing as people with the *EXACT* same system spec as me, down to the motherboard release revision, but havin a gf3 ti500 not only run *perfectly* stable but FASTER than my 9800 pro

the best you can do is really minimize things and pray, and you'll still probably crash once or twice a week, more if yer on alot

Hi!
What REALLY helped me is to turn on "Wait for vertical sync" in the graphic-card-settings...
I know it gets slower... but it just works fine then!

not to be down on yer success fez... but thats pretty much unrelated to any of the crashing/corruption/color issues... all vertical sync does is synchronize the flipping of already drawn and completed frames to the screens' refresh rate... it really won help SL much and will make the already somewhat erratic framerates much worse

am i the only one with a ati 9800 that can't even get into the game ?

well if ya can't get into the game, somethins probably configured very wrong on yer computer... care to elaborate exactly whats happening, and your exact driver/SL settings?

I wanted to keep most gfx enabled, this is what works mostly for me.

Performance options, all unchecked.
Avatar (Bumped and Cloth)
Terrain (Detailed)

Options
AGP, Large, 256 Megs,
Object - Full
Trees - Lowest
Av - Full

Draw Distance - 192
Bump 2
Outfit 2

I have a 1.5meg connection, but I limit it to 600K.

Catalyst 3.10, Everything off, HQ settings, VS off

Proc AMD 2600, Gig ram, ATI 9700 Pro

I play windowed, so I can irc, and work on projects, and listen to winamp.

About 10-15 FPS outside, and 30-45 FPS inside.

the game was working fine, i didn't change anything on my system. just downloaded the new version of SL
p4 2.53
ati 9800 pro
aopen tube sound board
700 +ram

all newest drivers
ati 3.10 drivers

i did crash my system when trying to update SL

but i totaly un instaled and reinstaled it, and it still doesn't work

need anymore info to help me out ?

you should be able to clear out the cache directory SL uses.. in XP its in documents and settings, yer username, application data, SecondLife... i *think*.. jus delete that directory and everything should reset to running with all the defaults

A couple of comments:

- If you need to clear out Second Life caches and directories, you can uninstall it prior to downloading the latest version. This will clear out all the cached data, settings, &c.

- Out recommendations for ATI users (after getting the latest drivers and BIOS) are to disable AGP, cloth ripple, bumpiness and shininess, and vertex programs (these are under Edit->Settings). This will minimize our usage of the ATI OpenGL driver and increase stability.

- If you are having problems with your ATI, please report these bugs to ATI at http://mirror.ati.com/support/contact.html . The more ATI users who report bugs with Second Life, the more we are able to get solid support from them on the PC side.

- If you are running on the Mac, ATI is an excellent choice (we just finished a great week at Mac World running on an ATI 9800), although we did uncovered a major fog bug in their OpenGL drivers which they need to fix. You can have AGP and vertex shaders on with the Mac version.

Cory