Account reactivated? No thanks, free? No thanks.

You guys still can't get things to work right on ATI. I'm not even going to try anymore, I'm tired of it. I decided to give the latest build a try after receiving an E-Mail saying my account was reactivated and there were no charges. Ok I thought, lets see if it works.

With brand new ATI 4.10 drivers at their FACTORY DEFAULT settings I launched the application, entered my login information and voila! Me in the training world.. Wait a second, black screen...no wait, me, no, black screen, no wait, me, no black screen...black screen.. Fun. OK, uninstall.

If you can't get the dang program to work with ATI cards with factory default settings then please stop contacting me, I have no more patience with your client which will not work properly.

It's not Linden Labs' fault that the ATI cards don't work. It's ATI's fault. Contact ATI and tell them you want their cards revamped. Sorry the game doesn't work with your specifications.

My card works fine and so do the dozens and dozens and dozens of other games and applications I've run with it. If Linden Labs cannot properly QA a product to work with one of the highest penetrating video manufacturers then it's THEIR problem, not mine. I don't care to QA their software for free anymore.

Actually, that's not entirely true. It's a combination of both. ATI and nVidia both have 'optimizations' for OpenGL use. SecondLife uses these very heavily. However, nVidia's optimizations are not compatible with ATI's, and since SL focuses on nVidia's, almost every single 'graphics feature' in SL needs to be written twice, once for nVidia, once for ATI. This hasn't happened, so we only have one truly functional card.

You get what you pay for?

(Sorry, that was pretty useless.)

Factory defaults aren't always the best anyway...why not post some more info here and see if anyone here can help? Isn't a "black screen" issue one of the (possibly) anti-alias related problems? I'm sure I've heard it mentioned here before.

ATI cards DO work, mine works "awesomely". (Although with most special features off.)

Having an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and having no problems with any other game except SL, I understand why you would not want to deal with the frustraition. However, SL will run fine for me *most* of the time if I keep a few options turned off, and its great. So, if you care to try it again, I doubt you do, but oh well, if you want to here are some suggestions.

Make sure Anti-Alianizing(I can't spell right, but you know what I mean) is off. The black screen you described can sometimes result as a problem of having FSAA on.

In SL preferences, turn off AGP Graphics Acceleration, this causes crashing frequently. Also turn off Avatar Vertex, this causes problems with avatars and maybe other things.

Lower your Draw Distance, this can help somewhat.

There are other things too, but the above should fix more problems, you can always lower all your settings, but thats not fun.

I found the 4.1 drivers broke my "shiny" effect with objects in SL. Other than that there seems to be little if no difference for SL using 3.10 or 4.1 drivers.

The above is alot to do for a program you don't seem very interisted in, but I found doing it is worth my time because I love SL. The ATi "issue" is a frustraiting one for many, hopefully some day it will be fixed by someone.

I vote that they higher eltee and have her fix what she can.

I wish they reactivate my account. :-/

Bob, I understand your frustrations -- that was my experience as well with a clean install of SL back in July. I worked an hour (never saw the entrance because the screen would continually blink to black, then focus, then black out again.) I can easily recreate this in game by just changing back to the default card settings.

I changed the settings (and with Catalyst 4.1 you can save and reload these) for the Open GL, 3D graphics, etc. Simply lower them or change the settings to "software" versus the card settings.

I'm running a 9700 ATI Pro; and since the recent upgrades, I'm not having any texture corruption of AV faces in large crowds. I still experience some texture corruption (rare) inside of large builds.

But this problem has been happening for a long, long time. What Bob described was my initial experience in SL after an installation and login -- and that was reported back in July!

And Bob's right -- there are not many willing or knowledgeable enough to know what graphic settings to change to get SL to work right with an ATI on the initial installation -- many have probably walked away thinking the software is glitchy and not worth the time to tweak.

Nevermind.. Had my ATI opinion here, but decided not to gas up the fire. Had them, dont like them, wont ever try em again...

All the other games that I own (aside from some weird exceptions) work completely with ATI, -and- Nvidia

This is how you get burned by selling out to a particular card vendor and writing propertairy optmizations.

While SL runs on my ATI box, it's fraught with horrors of texture glitching, faces that turn to solid colors like red and black and orange from a distance for no apparent reason.

Writing non-vendor specific code from the beginning is the smart way to make 3d programs, or you get burned.

Just curious, how many of those games are OpenGL?

I'm not privy to the source code so I can't be sure how many optimizations have been written for either ATI or Nvidia chipsets, but here's what I know:

ATI's Windows drivers suck. This isn't an opinion, it is a fact.

The problem with the argument, "all other games work fine with ATI" is that it's simply not true. Depending on the driver revision, you can expect to see some or all of the rendering errors you get in SL in almost any OpenGL-based game.

Moreover, the MacOSX port of SL actually runs better on ATI hardware than on Nvidia hardware. This is because the ATI Mac drivers are far, far superior to their Windows counterparts, to say nothing of Nvidia's Mac drivers, which have documented bugs, specifically regarding vertex functions.

Also, I've noticed the "SL sold out to Nvidia" meme growing in strength recently. To me, that seems so completely silly as to verge on sarcasm or parody. The idea that Linden Lab would intentionally limit themselves to a single GPU platform -- and not, I should note, even the industry frontrunner -- is completely laughable.

To you its a fact, to me its an opinion, I've never had troubles with my ATI except for with SL. So I can't view it as fact when the problems have never surfaced for me. I'm not saying its 100% SL's problem, but I don't think its 100% ATI's problem.

Also if you don't believe SL was written towards nVidia:

http://www.rpgwh.net/content/comments/1052942392,48135,.php



"The two companies also announced that they are working together to includefuture optimizations specifically for the GeForce FX family of GPUs, raisingthe bar on the level of visual realism of Second Life."

It may not be towards ALL nVidia cards, but its optimization for nVidia none the less.

HM! Careful on this one. I think when using OpenGL on the Mac you go through the Quartz interface, which handles the actual OpenGL communication with the drivers, and as such optimizations and such are handled by Quartz, and not the application's concern.

I could be way off on this though, just random reading I did leads me to this conclusion.

Jeez, Bob... I hope you don't just blindly follow the instructions in any email you get!

You coulda just ignored it... I'm sure they didn't insist you installed it on pain of death.

Back up your facts with some kind of proof or stop making false statements about ATI drivers.

When every OpenGL game I have works great with ATI drivers except SL there's only one possible conclusion: Linden Labs don't know how to write a decent piece of software..

What other OpenGL games do you have?

Why do you want to know?

Why do you want to answer a question with a question? Oh great, now I am doing it.

Because, quite frankly, there aren't many.

Most games have no delusions of being cross-platform, ever. The ones that do are typically PC/Console cross platform. As such, most games these days are using DirectX, and not OpenGL.

OpenGL games are quite a rarity these days.

I'm sure there is a more appropriate place to note this, but...

My home has a "friendly rock" that greets you and remembers who it gave a greeting to so that it doesn't need to annoy you again. My build was visited by an avatar named "ATI Tester" recently. So it doth appear that someone is busy on the issue.

Yeah I met a 'Michael ATI' once wandering around the old Avatar central, long before it was taken down. Was nice to see they were/are taking an active interest.

You can do a search for ATI in game and find a bunch of people with that name.

But as far as ATI goes... ATI sucks. Period. I can't tell you how many times my old ATI card would cause problems for me. Beta tested Shadowbane... The only way to play was to have TWO copies of the client open, because my card was an ATI card. Earlier driver versions made games like Max Payne glitchy as all 'ell, and even made benchmarking programs screwy.

See, what the problem was is that my card wasn't made by a well-known manufacturer. It was a crappy po-dunk one that Gateway had decided to buy it's cards from that day, so the actual chip was ATI, but it was a off-brand one. So off brand, in fact, that after buying the card, the next six drivers straight off of ATI's website didn't even recognize the card as being an ATI card. I had to write them and give them a number digitally etched into the hard-coding of it to get them to recognize it... THEY hadn't even known it was made.

ATI's run by a bunch of monkeys that don't know how to write drivers or handle graphics cards. THAT is the problem here.

Aw, fer cryin' out loud -- is anyone really taking seriously the idea that NVidia is better than ATI or ATI is better than NVidia? They're neck-and-neck, very comparable in performance across the broad range, and that includes the drivers. Great cards, great drivers, especially compared to what I've owned before -- Matrox, Savage, early ATI, early NVidiots, etc.

Just as it should be. . . monopolies are Satanic.

I can't tell you how bad some of my old NVidia cards "sucked", and how good my ATI 8500 and 9800 Pro have been. . . . and how good my NVidia 5900 card has been. (But my favorite cards of all time were my dual 3Dfx Voodoo2 cards in SLI configuration. . . . Rock and Roll at 1024X768 16K color! They're still installed for those "nostalgia" trips -- hey!? Maybe I ought to try them for SL. . . . )

LL needs to complete dual optimizations for OpenGL, or publicly warn potential subscribers about the problem. . . Or offer a credit to ATI-owners toward the purchase of an NVidia card. . . .

Please, please, can't we all just learn to get along?

the black screen issue is actualy *VERY MUCH* LL's fault and deals specifically with something thats going on with the mouse events

basically you get this when you try to run SL with fsaa enabled. Something in how SL is handling the mouse events within the 3d space is causing this and it has *NOTHING* to do with ati's drivers, nor is there any concievable way ati could 'fix' it since its not broken on their end.

(to confirm this with *ANY* ati system, enable anti-ailasing from the display control panels and use the keyboard to launch SL, enter your login and hit enter (keeping the mouse out of the frame entirely)

sl will boot up and launch into the game world looking beautifully smooth with the fsaa takin out alla jaggies.

you can walk around (with the keyboard), talk do whatever you want without touching the mouse and it works fine

*now* move the mouse gently over to the top of the window by the menus, now navitage around the menu's... everythings still fine

move the mouse OFF the menu an into the 3d space *BAM* full screen black

clicking the mouse repeatedly disengages whatever part of he draw code is causin that black and you get flickers of the image coming through, click fast enough and you can almost maintain a constant display... but the second that mouse moves a single pixel yer back to black

i've bug reported it 3x, started 4 threads on it over the past months, had MANY friends repeatedly verify it... lindens have never so much as acknowledged it