Why do triangles converge on my avatar.

Recently I've noticed that my avatar quite often has 1 or 2 triangles converging on his head. If I rotate, it may go away, often to return. It often blocks my view of the scene around me and is quite annoying. The triangles appear in snapshots. Do you have any idea how to make it go away?

Are they colored? If so, you may have accidentally activated Show Updates. Ctrl-Alt-Shift-U

I pressed your buttons, but that didnt change anything.

Any more suggestions? They appear in a snapshot I took, which I could send you, if you tell me how.

I had that too! Do you have an ATI card? You have to download the latest drivers.

I'll try that. Would it make sense that the rendering with the triangles would also appear in a snapshot? As mine does.

Yes it does. It's a graphics glitch or something. My triangles even show as reflections in the water. It started when I was using the windlight release candidate version. There's a new ati driver that just came out this month. Seems to have fixed it for me.

If the driver doesn't fix it, try turning off VBO in SL's graphics hardware preferences.
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How do I do that, and what is VBO?

I'm getting the triangles bug too, but I don't know what VBO is or how to turn it off. I've only been getting this since downloading the latest viewer, and the advanced graphics tab has gone. There's not much in the way of options on the new graphics tab!

Alternatively, any suggestions on how to revert to the previous viewer (which worked fine) would be appreciated!

Hi Damien! VBO's are "vertex buffer objects", an OpenGL thing, and if your driver or graphics card doesn't support them right, you'll sometimes see grayscale triangles shredding the rendering around your avatar. To turn them off, Edit/Preferences/Graphics (custom). Look for the "Hardware Options" button on the bottom right, then uncheck "Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects", and hit OK. If your hardware or driver wasn't supporting them (common with ATI cards), you may see a speedup as well.

To downgrade, look at this blog post, about a third of the way down there are links to 1.19.0.5 for all platforms: http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/04/03/the-new-viewer-a-well-oiled-machine/

Good luck!
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This can also be caused by overheating of your graphics card. Check the inside of your system (or pay a professional to do it, if you don't feel comfortable yourself) - make sure your fans are clean of dust and spinning at top speed under load. Add another case fan if you need to.

Many thanks - that worked

Wow, that's scary, thanks for the tip. Can I just turn it off and use a vacuum cleaner to suck the dust out *without* taking the cover off?

I had some horridly random 'poles' coming off of myself, others, and off of random objects in the distance and I turned the VBO off and it worked wonders. Just in case anyone else was having the weird 'pole' effect going on.

This is a problem that has been going on since the introduction of Windlight. Now that Windlight has been incorporated into the standard viewer, there are going to be a lot more complaints.

See:http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3258. You will see that this has been a hotly discussed issue. Sorry folks, we tried to warn them, lol.

This affects ATI cards and has been found to be an ATI driver problem.
The only temporary fix is to turn off Enable VBO in your graphics>Hardware tab.

Turning VBO off will greatly reduce your performance and is only a temporary solution. My system drops from 18-20 fps to 4-5 fps with VBO turned off.

I have learned to keep the hardware tab minimized with VBO enabled, and when the triangles become unbearable, maximize it, un-check Enable VBO, let the screen clear, then re-check it, then minimize the Hardware tab again. Earlier drivers, I am (now) using 7.10, seem to be less of a problem than the current ones.

ATI is currently working with LL for a fix for this. I even went as far as replacing my ATI card with a nvidia, the performance dropped dramatically and I put the ATI card back.

/me waves to Zen Linden, hehe