Th texture problem(s)

It has been discussed a bit in-world and appears to hurt iMac G5 users. To describe it as accurately as possible:

- Objects have two different textures when wieved from far or near. One of the two textures is correct, the other is wrong, either picked at random in the world, in clothes, in skin, either a kind of red/green checkerboard. When viewing an object under a low angle, a large horizontal plane for example, the two textures blends at intermediate distance.

- Two or more texture are switching rapidly (several times per second) on the same object. When a texture is "poisoned", it remains so forever.

- Both problems show in the texture picker's preview. The texture in the preview flickers, and is different when displayed full-window.

- Textures are picked from UI. This is often the case with clothes. For example, I wear a shirt with a menu bar collar.

I was hoping a fix with SL 1.13. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Strangely, the problem may disappear for a full week then come back. This is my grief #1, just before packet losses (maybe the two are related), and makes me cry up to the point i will stop playing SL. It's upsetting and makes SL an horrible experience. We have two cases:

This is fixable and will be fixed.

This is not fixable, so please LL, let us know which models are concerned so we can choose another one. If all iMac G5, or Mac+Geforce, or any identified model(s) have this bug, we can say that these computers ARE NOT QUALIFIED for SL and stop hurting our eyes.

I am not seeing this issue.
I have a G5 power mac with ATI x850 and I don't see it.

I can imagine that it would be a huge pain in the butt though
I have seen it before in other games. Like it happen to me in WoW for a bit, then they resolved it.

Seems in SL it is a Mac (OS X) +Geforce Problem, i have it too.

And sometimes the system freezes foruhmm 45secs, and comes back again..whyever.


But the Texture Problem needs to be fixed.

I have an iMac G5 with nVidia GeForce FX 5200. I've heard that this AGP is the source of the problem, and a quick (but too narrow to be significant) survey in 'Macintosh Users' tends to point the FX5200 as a problematic chipset. There exists a tweak using GLProfiler to change driver parameters, but it don't work in all cases.

We should try to make sure that the problem is bound to a paticular chipset so that LL developers can fix it. In the case it is unfixable, what i would understand, we could avoid a lot of pain by stating clearly that these Macintosh should be avoided to play LL.

I have an iMac G5 with GeForce FX 5200 chipset, and I have this issue too. It is very disruptive to play. This is an issue that really needs to be fixed asap, please.

The problem has totally gone away for some days. I've made no change to my configuration. True for main client version as well as beta focus.

Well the same happened for me after the update a week ago. Textures hardly ever caused me a problem.
Now since the upgrade last night they seem to have reappeared with a vengence! Flashing all over the place.
If this really is a graphics card problem (yes I have a G5 iMac, not Intel) then how come the problem went away for nearly a week?
Anyone found a work around for this? I've tried clearing the cache, rebaking textures etc.

Yes we've discussed this issue here before, not even a month ago now.. the chipset for this model is not on the minimum recommended graphics support list.

http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php

But I would use the Report Bug option under the Help menu if you want to report it as a bug rather than consider it a documented feature of not meeting system requirements..

It's difficult for me to say if a Geforce FX5200 is "better" or not than a Geforce 2 or a Geforce 2mx. But I think the FX5200 should be part of the "non compatible" list until this behaviour is fixed, if it happens to be. In the meantime, we should consider the iMac models featuring this board as uncompatible with SL (since the AGP is not upgradable).