More recent drivers for older ATI cards?

Heyaz, al!

I gotta say, the 'Release Candidates' (hah!) for version 1.20 are scaring the hell outta this aging-PowerMac user... Glow is broken, water has no reflections, and lighting generally just looks dimmer overall :/ plus, at some point during the run-up to 1.19, bumpmapping stopped working properly on shiny, flexi objects (which my av, in particular, uses a bunch of). Grrr

The party line seems to be "It's your drivers! Update 'em!!" but I can't seem to find any mention of newer drivers for the ATI X800XT Mac edition. The the only ones for this card at the AMD/ATI website are from 2005 (?!)...

Is this finally it for me? Up until quite recently, my June 2004, dual-2ghz G5 with 7 gigs of RAM (and the above mentioned video card, of course) was generally quite comfortable in SL, especially given it's age.

This recent borkiness just seems so abrupt, but I'm thinkin the writing's finally on the wall for my beloved PowerPC Since I can't afford to replace the machine at this time, things are feeling a bit desperate...

Any luck out there finding newer drivers?

thx

The Dazzle release candidate is utter-crap, if they try to force it on us then there is going to be a big outcry

Hey Truthseeker,

I think we have the same machines....though I have the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 in mine (and 8gig ram).

But same here running sl on that machine is for crap. It used to work great until 1.19 came out. Now I only seem to get 1-2 fps. And yes I have tried all the suggestions on here for settings.

I have been using my laptop (macbook pro) and sl runs fine on here, for the most part. RadeonX1600 and 1 gig ram.

It's sad my desktop has all that power and ram and can't run this little game. I've been contemplating upgrading my graphics card to the ATI x1900 but haven't pulled the trigger on that yet. Not only for this game but I'm also starting to get into video.

It would be nice if I could start using sl on my desktop again since it has a 30' cine screen and right now I'm using a little 14".

Please post if you do find anything out and I will do the same

Cheers!
JL

www.omegadrivers.net.

P2

When they first started showing off Windlight, I looked at my Mac Mini and started saving up for a new computer. Because it was clear that eventually my old hardware was going to be incapable of accessing SL. I was in the same boat. Even on the omegadrivers site and others, no one had made new drivers for my old Mac Mini's graphics chipset.

If you have a Mac that has a graphics card that has had no supported graphics card updates since 2005, then it's past due to get yourself a new Mac. The newest iMacs are not all that expensive, and have killer video cards.

Hi Truthseeker, sounds like we have similar macs. windlight truly sux with our high end ati cards. And don't bother going to the url Phoenix provides here, its for PCs, you're right, no driver upgrades since 2005. When i need to get work done in sl, i use the previous client version, when i want to have a drink and sit on the beach, I use windlight.

I uupgraded my 2005 PPC G5 by replacing the ATI 9800 pro (which was unable to render windlight) to a flashed nVidia 7800 GT. This one runs windlight and nearly doubled my framerates overall (if not more).

But...(sighs)...obviously there are different problems now. Look at my bug report:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-6942

I doubt they will drop support for G5 machines, for they were only discontinued in 2005/2006. Too many people are still running these machines.

I think this is just a bad, bad bug, which affects every other nVidia GPU and is not related to the CPU type. G5 are still doing fine.