Major ATI Graphics Card problems

I also have the standard crashes and a couple of times I've gotten the monitor "sleep mode" problem too. I thought it was just my KVM switch screwing up again so I haven't mentioned it, but apparently it's SL related... I'm working with ATI also, 3.7 drivers (rolled back). It's one of those goofy watered down Dell versions of a decent ATI card.

No crashes at all with 3.7 drivers but I don't remember if I turned on bump mapping. I'm pretty sure I turned it off.

I have no crashes with a Radeon 9800, 3.7 Catalyst drivers, and I have Bump Mapping turned on.

-Bone

A couple thoughts:

1. With all cards, we recommend you have the latest motherboard drivers and BIOS updates installed. Older drivers, especially AGP drivers on AMD compatible motherboards, don't seem to love us very much unless you're running the latest and greatest. As always, if you've never done a motherboard and/or BIOS upgrade, we encourage you to ask someone who has as very_bad_things can happen if this process fails. Also, motherboard and BIOS updates usually come from the manufacturer of the motherboard, though you can check a comp-uter manufactuer as well if you've got a computer you didn't cobble together yourself.

2. Laptops. Please disregard the above statement with regard to going to the MB manufacturer for AGP and BIOS upgrades (of Graphcis Card drivers for that matter.) Laptops are funny creations whereby an entire computer's worth of silicon is magically compressed onto a single board. Of course, everyone who makes laptops does things juuuuuuuuuuuuust a little bit differently than everyone else.

As a result, you really are dependant on the manufacturer of your laptop for all your drivers. Why? Because they may be using a brand name chip, but the way they are accessing it is done unique to their company. So, while there are hacked drivers out there which will try and take advantage of the most recent drivers from the chip manufacturers, unless you know for sure the modified driver comes from an engineer who works for your laptop manufacturer and put as much testing into it as the graphics card company did, we really can't guarantee Second Life is going to work the same as it might with a card with the same chip and standard drivers.

Colin

First, a note to Dave. Doug L is correct that VPU Recover requires a reboot. When it was triggered on my system during the 1.1 Beta, it actually forced me to reboot. The purpose of it is to trap hardware conflicts before they freeze your system and force you to do the "shutdown-of-death" (in other words, pull the plug). This allows you to save any open files before rebooting, which otherwise would be lost.
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I'm running a Radeon 9200 128DDR with Cat 3.8, PIII 1.2GHz on an Intel mobo, 256mb SDRAM, 640k DSL. I did have some crashing during the Beta, but it's been stable so far on the new release.

However, the rendering is unspeakably slow, even with everything set to absolute minimum and several types of rendering disabled in Debug. And it looks absolutely ghastly, even if I just stay still and turn all settings to the max. I've submitted a slew of Bug reports already, including several on rendering errors. I'm baffled by this, because it was running so well toward the end of the test period (except for Ripple of course), and looked fantastic (I've got the screenshots to prove it).

More specifically, the clipping always seems to be right in front of me regardless of my Distance setting. And the clipping rolls in a very unnatural, circular drop off. I'm sure this was done deliberately to speed things up, but it's intolerably bad. And rendering speed is actually worse than ever. I often get frozen for thirty seconds while the server catches up, and constantly have brief freezes; again, this is in spite of running bare bones settings.

The rendering looks soft and imprecise, to the point of seeming out of focus. Texture edges are tearing like crazy. Colors are muted. It's just dog-ugly.

And of course there are many other problems; like the land that was stolen from me during the conversion from 1.0 to 1.1, and clothes not fitting properly on the redesigned bodies, and errors in the World Map.

Yup, if things don't improve greatly within the next week it looks like I'll be on vacation until 1.1 SP1. Very disappointing.

-BAY

Even with the new version, minimul settings, I still crash when im in my home (Tan, 110, 150) and move/move the camera around.

I completely re-everythinged (uninstalled, deleted cache, etc) and the crashes are still coming. I even went back to 3.8 thinking that 1.1.1 would solve some of the problems. Nope

(As an aside... Blackadder, you probably shouldn't pull the plug to reboot your machine. If ctrl+alt+del doesn't seem to do anything, try holding down the power switch for 5 seconds. )

I've never heard of that one before. Thanks Cubey, I'll try that the next time my system freezes (hopefully never).

-BAY

Hi, Im new to SL!

If you've been getting the black screen with an ATi card. Try running the game in a window, worked for me.

YAY!

I downgraded back to the Dell standard for my laptop (catalyst 3.1) and had the most stable performance. I turned off Avitar Vertex Program, and could see the textures on avitars correctly!!

Problem:
Movement is VERY jagged, the framerate is quite high when your not moving around, however it drops down to < 10 when you move, I've tryed many different configs and so far nothing's really had an effect

Note:
I have both the direct3d and openGL settings in my ATI control panel set to full performance.

Catalyst 3.1 is the god of ATI drivers

==Chris

Chris, try turning off Tree Rendering, helps with FPS a lot.

Do it from Debug.

Tryed that, not much of a difference.