Crashing due to low VRAM.

Recently, my very awesome video card died and I've been a bit slow in getting the thing packaged up and sent back to the manufacturer for a replacement. So I've been living on my old NVidia Geforce2 MX 400 with 32 MB VRAM.

I can get by on this card, though if the world isn't half grey, it's a big blur for anything beyond a 5 meter radius of my avatar. I get by for the most part, but one thing I can't do reliably anymore is sail competitively.

Myrrh Massiel and Pixeleen Mistral both have had crashing issues during the races. Multiple times they will crash only to log back on and try again. This has been going on for weeks, since maybe the initial 1.8 updates? Stubborn, those two.

I used to attribute the crashing to their measly Macs, but now I am experiencing the same issue with my PC. And where we crash during the race seems to be predictable: either while gathered around the start/finish line or as we're passing a couple of the developed areas during the long races. Those two have 64 MB VRAM while I have 32.

Last race I was in, I used my brother's iMac which has 128 MB VRAM. The world only looked marginally better on his machine in spite of the superior video card -- something I do attribute to how crappy SL works with Macs. (This means I suspect Myrrh's and Pixeleen's 64 MB is equivalent to my 32.) But the important thing is I did not crash.

So anyway, I'm starting to suspect the culprit is textures. But why crash during sailboat races and not when I'm walking around? I thought maybe because when I'm walking around, it's a slower process and maybe it's allowing more time for my graphics card to load the information.

Another thing is that Pixeleen and Myrrh could hardly stand around during the boat show for more than thirty seconds before crashing, but once Pixeleen deleted the docks and boats, she was pretty much okay for the race later on. And also, the modding of boats has really only been prevalent recently, thus maybe attributing to why she crashes so much now versus just a few weeks back.

The thing is, I'm not a technical person, I can only find correlation on events. And I'm not sure what gathering data to send to LL would accomplish anyway, it's such a specific occurrence to those with mediocre video cards, and nowhere near LL's target base.

I guess what I'm wondering is if there are any of you reading this with equally mediocre video cards who aren't experiencing the same issues, or possibly are and it's prevented you from racing much like it has me and Myrrh. Curiosity more than anything. Even if everyone raced unmodded Takos to spare my texture loading, I doubt I could race still since I also have a problem with whole boats disappearing on me. (I tried sailing with that problem a couple weeks ago and quit after a couple races after having hit an invisible boat for the upteenth time.)

Of course, the solution for me personally is to get my stupid broken card in the mail. Any day now, seriously.

A few observations:

First, I've been racing under the conditions you describe, invisible boats, minimal detail, etcet, just about as long as I've been sailing competitively. I guess I'm just stubborn about it, but I found ways to cope, reducing SL to a tiny window, keeping all my graphics settings at a bare minimum, rebooting between long races, editing the HUDlite to make it readable at such low resolution, etcet. So it's doable, but racing has always been an exercise in preparation and patience for me.

Secondly, this particular stability problem didn't start until the release of SL 1.8. It slowly increased in frequency afterward, which initially I attributed to increasingly-poor client stability, but in retrospect it strictly correlates to the advent and increasing popularity of custom Tako textures. Pixeleen experienced the same problem, and she's also running the Mac client with 64 megs of video memory.

I can verify from personal experience with two machines more-or-less identical save Video RAM that, at least on the mac client, bumping up to 128 makes all the difference in the world. SL crashes only a couple of times per night on the 128-meg machine while my own 64-meg machine crashes up to eight times per hour.

It really behaves similarly to a memory leak during texture cache swaps, much more severe of a problem on the Mac client than under Windows. I doubt LL will ever fix it at this point; I've filed hundreds of bug reports in the months since 1.8 was released.

Anything the sailing community can do, since the bug's both most prevalent and most critical while racing? Short of asking people to replace their videocard (not really an option for folks with laptops), I've proposed that the T/class boats have no-mod textures to at least provide one reasonable outlet folks with less video RAM can sail under.

Barring other sailing-community specific fixes and recommendations for racing stability, technical speculation is probably better suited to the Technical Issues forums. I will restrain my cynical urge to comment on what good that might do.

dunno about mac's (mine sucks too bad to run SL, or open GL in genral hehe) but in pc land ive used a 64mb and 2 128mb video cards, and the only thing that made a difference was the GPU clock speed and raw performance

Narrowing it down to 'VRAM' is an oversimplification of a complicated issue.
Any of the following will cause very poor performace in SecondLife:

Less than 64 MB Video RAM (128 MB is ideal, more will only make a slight improvement)
Video cards older than a GeForce 4, and some other low end or laptop video cards.
Processors slower than about a 1.5 GHz Intel processor.

This is a very quick and dirty "minimum spec". It may be possible to run Second Life on a machine that does not meet these requirements, but it is not recommended. Definitely set your draw distance down to 64 m on lower end machines.

Note: pre intel iMacs tend to have relatively slow processors and slow video cards. The non Intel iMacs we have in the office barely run SL, the intel iMacs run it just fine.

I have a 2 GHz PC with an ATI 9600 video card with 64 MB that runs SL very well (draw distance of 12.

Well, actually, I am doing some simplification on the cause of my problem because it's a very specific instance when it happens, having started when my NVidea 6800 GT died on me and I had to resort to the old card I had before it.

The crashing is most likely to happen when I sail -- not when I am flying around in my blimpquito contraption or skydiving or whatnot. And it seems to happen when textures are in abundance or when I'm nearing the finish line. So I'm guessing it's a combination of the low-end graphics card and something about the Flying Tako boat. Having figured that, I'm not looking to fix the problem so much as inform others with my same problem that getting a better graphics card might solve their issues.

'Course, I only know of two other people with my problem, and those are the Mac users running 64 MB graphic cards. One of those people which, after he reads this, I can see getting his full on rant mode about the comment that Macs having slower processors or video cards. Well, iMacs would, I guess, but he runs a PowerMac. SL simply doesn't port well to the pre-Intel Macs, I'm assuming because of the different architecture of Macs and not for any inferior hardware. I'm also assuming with the Intel Macs for sale, support for the older Macs, such as it was, will cease. Just about every hardcore Mac user is used to this, though -- the sad cost of thinking different.

I've relocated this thread from the Second Life Sailing Federation group forum, as it's evolved into something more properly engaging the general community's technical discussion. I've located it under Mac Discussion since the Mac client seems to suffer most severely from this issue.

Does Ram play a big part in Second Life? I have 384 and my computer said at one point WindowsXP and SL was using around 300mb of that! If I upgraded to 512 would that make a big difference? How about connection speed? My cable provider has a 'light speed' tier that's faster than currently. Would that get the textures and stuff to load faster and prevent chugging?

With Hard drive games it's as simple as either the video or the memory but what's specific for games that run mostly online...?

- Jolan

I started playing SL with 512 MB in February 2005. It was OK, not spectacular but just all right.

I upgraded to 1.5 GB of RAM about 4 months ago. I was FLOORED at how much faster EVERYTHING in SL ran. I bought it to improve my computer's performance in Photoshop (a full page ad for the Messenger can easily be 200 MB or more in size) but discovered that it boosted my SL performance as well.

The moral of the story: find out how much RAM your motherboard supports, and if you can at all afford it, max it out.

P2