ATI Catalyst 7.12 - 9.3 graphics performance extremely bad

I am stuck with an old ATI Radeon 9600 which uses AGP slot so I can't upgrade the card and the new drivers (9.4 onward) are not valid. I have installed the Catalyst 9.3 software and the display is fine generally but SL crashed within minutes of login. I have now installed the Cool Viewer (thank you, Boy Lane). Initially all I saw was the kaleidoscope display but once I turned off the VBO thing this disappeared.
So far (and not very far yet) SL is stable and smooth, even if everyone looks ghostly grey until they come into range.
So I would say this was worth trying if you are in a similar situation.

I need some help I have a ATI Radeon in Window Vista I have read I should disable VOB but I can't find where VBO is. Can anyone tell me where the VBO is?

thanks

Go to Edit / Preferences / Graphics / Hardware Options.

is this in the graphics card area or on the computer itself. I know only so much tech stuff but i can follow detailed directions. Sorry

Thanks

It's in the Second Life interface.

You can bring up the Preferences dialog in Second Life using the menu, which is what the directions suggest.

You can also bring up the Preferences dialog by pressing Control-P.

wow i am happy so far its working..still annoying this graphics card does this for only this game. Thanks for the help

Looking through the online forums, the issue appears to be it the AIT drivers are not using video memory for textures in OpenGL. I checked this on my Radeon 4670 and it showed 0MB opengl texture memory while running the game, while my freinds 9600GT showed 512K. So for ATI cards it needs to fetch all the textures from main memory over the PCI/AGP bus which is very slow. And SL is a game that uses a lot of textures! The more textures the slower ATI cards will be. This is clearly an issue with ATI drivers but why they changed this I do not know. I raised a support ticket with ATI but all they were interested in was if SL ran at all; if it ran then no problems!

Anyway, saw a Geforce 9800GT OC on special offer. I have always been an ATI fan, so have resisted buying a Nvidia card. But the difference this card has made to my SL performance is amazing. If ATI sort out the OpenGL I may well go back as the 9800GT is so much loader than my 4670.....

@Jonvic

Where did it show 0MB texture memory? In the secondlife.log? If so could you please post that passage?

Hi Boylane. I used the tool GPU Caps Viewr : http://www.ozone3d.net/gpu_caps_viewer/

Using this tool it shows 0MB as the texture buffer size under the Open GL page with Catalyst 9.1. On a 9600GT it shows 512MB.

Thanks, but that doesn't help me much as I don't have an ATI card.

There was patch for the graphic cards memory detection which you can find in Jira VWR-12540. It is part of Cool Viewer 1.22.11.0 R4 now which you can find on my blog (see below). Could you do me a big favour and try that one, together with the GPU caps tool. Also please try the official viewer and send me both secondlife.log files. (you can install both in parallel, they don't interfer)

You can find them in (that's for XP):
C:\Documents and Settings\<you>\Application Data\CoolViewer\logs
C:\Documents and Settings\<you>\Application Data\SecondLife\logs

Ok after installing Cat 9.4 the GPU Caps Viewer shows 1024 Mb OGL Texture Buffer on my 4670 (it is a 1GB card). After reading some more I discovered that this just returns what ARB_texture_buffer_object extension sends back and ATI implemented this in Catalyst 9.3. However it makes no difference in the frame rates so I think it was a red herring. Also 9.4 is no better thabn 9.1 in this respect/

I am already running Cool Viewer R3c Boy and and I can confirm it does increase frame rates by around 20-25%; so the fix works on my set up. Have not tried R4 yet but will give it a go later and report back.