weird prisms shooting out of avatar

Hi, does anyone have an idea what those weird prims thingies are that are shooting out of the lady's avatar in this picture? Only she saw them, I didn't; and they didn't disappear after a relog.

Looks like she needs to turn off her Open Gl vertex buffers. Have her go to Preferences > Graphics > Hardware Options -- and uncheck the Open Gl box.

Either that or she's a Ninja Turtle in disguise

If its a new occurrence then possibly her graphics is card failing (maybe overheating maybe due to dust then blow it out) or its ...

Yes, this is the problem, but I think the name of the checkbox is "Enable VBO", yes?

This is a problem with ATI cards/drivers and SL; people say a fix is in the works but I see references to it still being around as of September. The quick fix is to disable Vertex Buffer Objects, as above. VBO is a speed optimization, but if your card can't handle it then it will actually slow you up.

Emerald will do that sometimes when the flexy boobies are on and it even happens to Nvidia cards.

that has happened to me in the past, an update of my vid card driver fixed it.

Oh, that's interesting. If it really happens only to Dylan's avatar, that could very well be it.

I agree although I noticed the problem on one of my old PCs as far back as summer 2007. ATI cards really don't cut the mustard with SL.

Thanks all, unchecking "Enable VBO" seems to have fixed the issue for my friend. And for the record, yes, she is using an ATI card.

This happened to me for the first time ever shortly after we installed Windows 7, about 2 weeks ago. Windows 7 worked perfectly for a few days and then the graphics broke down, not just in SL but in everything.

Someone suggested unchecking 'vertex shaders' in graphics, and that got rid of the spiky prims, but we haven't been able to cure the red and blue squares all over the screen which are present whatever the comp is being used for.

64 or 32 bit Win7? I am using the 32 bit for now because I was getting graphics errors with the 64 bit Win7 when playing Crysis. Those blue squares are sometimes the death throws of dieing GDDR. The only time I've personally seen the blue squares is when I was OCing graphics but they are popular screen shots in help forums. I am assuming that your graphics card is not OCed beyond manufacture's settings though. Sometimes BIOS or diver updates fix the problem but usually not.

Win 7 is new enough that driver and BIOS updates are good bets, heck an update for Win 7 may have required a drivers update for your graphics card. If you have a way of booting into an older version of Windows (please not Vista) then that may be a good way of determining if the problem is HW or SW.

Our Windows 7 is a clean update, it's 64 bit and the drivers are the latest. It seems the graphics card is in the process of dying.

I would hate to see you buy a new card if its unwarranted. First try toning down the graphics settings in the dashboard for your card, if that doesn't work you could try testing the card.

I have an Nvidia card but still use ATITool for testing purposes. It has a cool feature that scans for artifacts in non ATI rendered graphics. The program is designed for OCers but will let you know if your card is misbehaving.

ETA-Updating your MoBo's BIOS might help too.

ETA- ATITool can be found here for those who are interested.