No joy with GeForce 8800 GTS :(

Hello, I recently updated my video card, got a nvidia 8800 GTS. I installed the latest drivers, and everything runs fine with it, but not SL.

It won't even launch. I keep getting the error message saying that my video card "appears to be a GDI generic which SL does not support". It also says that they explicitly support a GeForce 2 and better... ^^

So I searched this site and found an entry in the knowledge base on the GDI error message. The information provided there did not help at all.

Has anyone of you ever had this problem and solved it ?

Thanks in advance for your replies

AA.

Might want to do a search inthe forums. I read some people having good luck with them......
Good Luck to you

Usagi

www.drivercleaner.net <download and clear out everything nvidia,

restart pc, and reinstall vid card drivers

that should do it, SL is to picky if you install over older driver it will sometimes smack you with that GDI blablabla, or roll back a driver version.

Thanks for posting the link! I just tried this out, but it didn't change anything

You have likely tried this but whenever you update your video card you have to completely remove Second Life and reinstall. At installation SL activates or removes certain files specific to your old card and mucks up the works for the new one.

You really gave me some hope... So I uninstalled and removed everything about SL from my hard drive. I reinstalled it, but it still won't work, I keep getting the same error message
I really don't know what else may help

Oh gesh!.......when are people going to learn that unstalling drivers is not the answers to these types of problems!

Go over here to see if you can find some answer.........
http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_build_gpu.html
http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t21028.html
http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=tech_support&message.id=188345

When it stops working for many who try it...

'cause getting GDI genertic error i windows nearly 99% of the time 'caused by keeping old drivers and install new ones without uninstalling

BTW the 8800 series are a rather new card and as such the drivers are going to be spotty at best for a few more months still. When they first came out the drivers wouldn't support OpenGL games at all. What driver did you install?

My driver is version 97.92, the latest nvidia driver that supports the 8800 (I have tried earlier versions as well, though). I've already thought that it may get fixed later on when the drivers are improved... I've been wondering if it is SL that does not support the card/driver or if it is the driver that is not optimized for SL... It's just a shame that everything runs smoothly, but SL.

~.~ friend of mine has this one > Asus GeForce 8800GTS (97.92drivers), he can log in on SL without a hitch , no idea what to say on this really, youre not on Vista right n.n

I've had no problems whatsoever with dual GeForce 8800 GTX. You're using GTS though, so maybe that makes a difference; I don't know.

You might want to check out the post on the Linden Blog about the 8800 if you're running Windows in 64 bit. Apparently the nVidia installer forgets to copy a necessary file for SL when installing the 64 bit driver.

Other than that, I'd suggest doing what has already been mentioned, which is to completely remove your previous video drivers (via driver cleaner, or whatever other method you're sure will get everything), then reboot, and install your 8800 drivers from scratch. If that doesn't work, I'm sorry I don't know what else to suggest. Good luck.

No, I am not on Vista, I run a 32 bit XP. I have read about the 64 bit issue though. Thili, what you said about your friend's card running SL perfectly confuses me even more.
Maybe I should once again try to reinstall everything, although I've already done all of that.
A friend also suggested that SL is optimised for ATI cards... I don't know if it's true, this really shouldn't happen with nvidia cards. Maybe I will get an equivalent ATI card instead in the end, I don't know. Anyway, thanks for your moral support

Pull out the Graphic Card. reinstall the drivers and try again.....

And No ATI are not optimised for Second Life Geforce GC are.........

Hi,

The 8800 series is supported, in version 1.13.1 it would have been detected as Nvidia.Generic and would have run without shader support, as soon as i got round to building myself a new pc i added the card to the list of known gpus and in 1.13.2 it should now have full shader support

See the secondlife.log file for more details but you should see

2007-01-21T01:14:18Z INFO: GPU is NVIDIA GeForce 8800
2007-01-21T01:14:18Z INFO: Setting GPU Class to Class3
2007-01-21T01:14:18Z INFO: Applying Feature Mask: Class3

Some other things to try other than the above, is to make sure no onboard graphics system is enabled, if the motherboard is new then check for bios updates and any driver updates for it, if that fails email a quick description of the problem and attach your secondlife.log file to [email]bugs@secondlife.com[/email] and post the RT#number you recieve in the autoreply here and i'll take a look.

Milo.

Well, I tried your advice and updated the bios. I shouldn't have, as something must have gone wrong with the update. Although the updating process went very smooth, after I rebooted in the end my system wouldn't start up anymore.
BTW my motherboard is an asrock ConRoeXFire-eSATA2.
I'd better order a new one right away

reset your bios after flashing it n.n (pin)
i doubt its dead really nowadays thats reaaaallly hard to do.

However sometimes they are fiddly at starting after flashing, mostly something got loose and pc start and...nothing happen.

- ram loose (happens alot n.n)

- vid card loose

- ram speed setting wrong, even with default/auto sometimes you need to only start pc with 2 sticks, to have it boot then clock it down, shut down , put in 2 more, start pc (yeh.. this is not what you have probably i just had that happen to me in 3 pc's here)

- psu sleep mode thingie... er... (wow im horrible at remembering today o.o) requires you to unplug it completly , turn it off, then hook it back on motherboard, and then flip power on it, then start

- cabinett ....whatchumahcallit... urg mmm name... chassis intrusion , pin must be on motherboard if it magically fell off (does this ever happen?) it wont boot your pc unless you close cabinett (if it actually uses that...anyone actually use it?).


o.o id so easy find this if i was there in person, done this ..waaay to many times and usually never a dead motherboard (never had it happen in about 60ish pc's i buildt)

this is what happens when I turn it on: At first everything looks OK: it counts the memory, shows all the drives etc. then I see the Win XP screen. After a short while, a blue screen with text appears for a fraction of a second only (so I cannot read what written there) and the system reboots. Strange... especially considering that I did the bios update by the book, everything went smoothly and it even shows the new version in the bios setup.

Maybe you are right and it is not completely dead; I should have someone else look at it who deals with this regularly, maybe I am lucky and I can save my €80 for a new board...

Hi,

This sounds more like its a missing/corrupt driver file/installation with windows itself, if your system has a set of install disks a system restore may fix the issue and as long as the machine doesnt require a reformat then nothing on the machine should be lost.

Milo

Hello,

I am back! I was able to fix the BIOS issue, it was just a missing setting in the setup after all, and now my computer happily boots again. I just received a mail from tech support requesting me to send that secondlife.log file. Too bad that I previously uninstalled SL and deleted everything related to it from my hard drive in order to do a fresh install of the newest version. Obviously SL has not run for the first time yet, so that log file has not yet been created. And due to my problem I cannot launch it

Hi,

As soon as you launch the secondlife program it will start logging even if you dont manage to login.

Milo.

Hi Milo,

I checked it again and now I found it, thank you. I just sent the log file to tech support, the RT number is 560226. I hope this will help find out what the problem is.

Austeja

From the logfile it looks like it cant initialise the opengl subsystem, only suggestion i have is what thili mentioned earlier in the thread to uninstall all nvidia drivers, reboot, run driver cleaner, reboot and then reinstall the latest nvidia drivers

Milo

Thank you, I will try this again and post the results, probably tomorrow !

AA.