Seeing Green Dots ;(

I posted this thread in resident answers thinking it wasn't a texture issue. Now I'm thinking it might possibly be a texture issue. If any of you texture experts would be so kind as to take a look at this thread and let me know if you think it is a texture issue, I would be greatful.

forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?p=1701228#post1701228

I didn't repost it all here because I don't think there needs to be two answer threads for this, but feel someone here might be able to help me figure out if it is an issue with the textures themselves.
Thanks.

I have a similar problem when I use my Toshiba laptop (with a NVS 110M graphics chipset), to run SL. As far as I can tell it seems to be related not to the graphics drivers, but some problem in the graphics chip itself.

It may also be due to overheating of the graphics card as I noticed the problem tends to be less if the computer is cold.

As was pointed out in the other thread, other people cannot see the dots, only you. However they will show up on screenshots....

I didn't see if you posted, what computer and card you had. If you were able to do so it might help. Also can you try running SL when the computer starts from cold to see if the issue is temperature related in your case (you might also see if you graphics card heatsink needs cleaning and if its cooling fan is running).

Today I saw a green dot when I was editing snapshot in photoshop when it was zoomed in thought it was strange.
Though not sure we are speaking of same thing.

Green dots! This looks an awful lot like a well known issue with texture memory corruption which can be caused by video card overheating or failing video memory. Look at some examples

http://www.playtool.com/pages/artifacts/de_dust20002.jpg (look at the arrays of dots on the door)

I myself had some green and purple dots showing up on the walls in Doom 3 when I overclocked my card a little too aggressively. If you're not overclocking, and the temperatures are reasonable on your card, you may have a bad card.

It does indeed look like the same kind of pattern, but if Sae's problem is really an overheating issue, it seems pretty odd to me that it would only be affecting one texture, and that the dots would seem so baked into the texture as they are. In the snapshots on the other thread, the dots were aligned in perspective with the wall surface, and appeared to get bigger in proportion with the texture pixels when the camera zoomed in.

The dots in your link however, Daniel, are facing the screen, completely independent of the texturing and the 3D geometry in the scene. This seems to be very different behavior.

They could well be two variation of the same effect. If Sae's texture buffers are flaky, aligned with the prim and zoomable would be expected as the GPU is responsible for mapping the texture onto the frame buffer and once the texture is mapped and rendered, artifacts placed into the frame buffer should increase in size in the same way that un-gliched pixels will also be "grown" by the GPU.

If, on the other hand, Daniel's frame buffer contained the defect, then you should see similar dot patterns, not aligned with the prim, but looking more like a "decal" stuck onto the screen surface.

As to the question of why the OP felt it better to cross-post the question rather than act on the hypotheses in the other thread, I have no idea. Perhaps he likes to fry motherboards from excess current disipation. I've seen motherboards get their "upstream" on-board graphics interface chips get blown by defective cards, most likely resulting from the Wideemann - Franz law. Running a system with a failed graphics adapter risks killing a ~$1.2k motherboard in order to "save" an already broken ~$200 graphics adapater.

I'm still looking into it. What I tried didn't work, so it looks like our next step may to be try and replace the video card if we can come up with no other solutions.

Out of curiosity, what kind of video card is it?

Chosen, that just depends on what part of video memory the corruption is in, an area used for texture memory (will align with texture) or framebuffer memory (will align with screen)