Running on ATI FireGL E1

I've been trying to get Second Life to run, and haven't had any luck yet. When I first downloaded it, I would get to the login screen in Second Life, log in, and it'd show a bar progressing. It'd get to the end, saying "Precaching", and then it'd crash, and it offered to send the crash report. I tried a few more times with the same result.

I figured it was probably my video card, a rare ATI FireGL E1 that only came as an OEM model installed on Dell Workstations, and a card that's given me no end of trouble trying to run games. From the looks of some searches of these forums and the Second Life support area, this seems a likely theory.

So, some posts in these forums suggested running a driver from http://www.omegadrivers.net/. I did so, and it installed fine, and seems to be better in many ways than what came with my system or available from Dell's site. My card now shows up in Device Manager as "ATI FireGL 8800 (Omega 3.8.205)". It's my understanding that the FireGL E1 is in many ways similar to the FireGL 8800, so this seems reasonable, and my computer seems to be running just fine with this driver.

Now when I try to run Second Life, I get a dialog fairly quickly saying "Your video card appears to be a GDI Generic, which Second Life does not support." It says that I can try to run Second Life anyway, but when I try I get an immedate message saying that "Second Life is unable to run because your video card drivers are out of date or unsupported.", and Second Life then quits.

So, I'm pretty sure that my card meets the specifications for what it'll need to run, if only I can find a driver that will expose the functionality in a way that Second Life will accept.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Some way I can force Second Life to try running anyway (although I doubt that'll work), or some other third-party driver that might have a better chance of working?

I'd appreciate any help anyone can give me.

Is your desktop color set to 32-bit?

hey peter,

i was playing with a firegl for a while last year and it was a horrible experience. the display would become garbled after a while of playing.

i am thinking firegl and quadro fx and any other higher end video cards are just not supported, only game cards are.

old thread

j-wu

You could always attempt to softmod it into a Radeon. FireGL & Radeon use the same chipsets much like the Quatro & Geforce cards do. Difference really is clock/memory speed and extra options enabled in the drivers. People softmod Radeons & Geforces into FireGLs & Quatros all the time and some have done the reverse (even though its not practical for the cost). Might be worth looking into.

Yes.

Although one of the peculiar "features" of this card is that it *doesn't* support 256-color mode, which confuses some older games I have when they try to set the screen to 640x480x8 for the title/menu screen and DirectX (or whatever) says "no", and they assume something is going horribly wrong.

I doubt that's what's happening here, however.