client lag issues radeon mobility 9000

I realize my graphics card is very much on (or beyond) the border of "tough shit, buy a new system" .. but, it had been working perfectly until the .11 release.

Following the .11 release, it seems to function fine for 30 , then un-usable for 30mins, then fine for 30 mins, and repeat. When I say fine -- I really do mean 'fine'!.. 128 meters, nothing disabled in debug, full speed and happy. Then suddenly, often when seemingly alone, it drops to 2 frames / second or so -- completely un usable.

During these periods -- , it is common to see avatar's torsos, heads, and arms invert -- including my own. The legs are fine, the waist folds in on itself, and the head shows up sometimes upside down, sometimes not, between the knees. Gradually, this all unfolds .. and then eventually repeats.

I followed the clean install suggestion and it seemed to really help! 3 logins, a good 30 minutes of playing time -- then suddenly worse than I'd even seen before.

Cache space on my drives are fine. Video drivers are as good as I can get them.

Any further tips here ? -- or did I just get flushed and forgotten by the client development?

I wouldn't even bother asking if it didn't run so perfectly about half the time without anything I can figure out affecting the slow points. Happy to provide more tech details on request.

Celeron M 1.40
1 Gig RAM
Radeon Mobility 9000 w/ 64 megs

Thanks!

Try turning off your firewall when you play, see if that helps. I know the firewall hurt me badly when playing SL. I thought it was a graphics issue also, but it wasn't.

Disabling firewalls, real time antivirus protection (not good overall, but sometimes can help games while they are active), etc. are all pretty helpful as a whole especially on lower end machines.

Another thing I would do is to get copies of the desktop ATI drivers that have been modified/hacked to load onto laptops. Laptop vendor drivers are usually very behind and don't necessarily support all the modern features or have the best performance.

On my previous two Dell laptops and my girlfriend's Toshiba I have loaded the modified ATI drivers and they help a huge amount for gameplay. An example is on my old laptop I couldn't play World of Warcraft (weird artifacting)or Age of Empires III (ran like garbage), after loading the hacked drivers it wasn't perfect but it was a HUGE step in performance.

The one problem with some of the hacked drivers is sometimes they wont' recognize non-standard LCD resolutions. For both of my laptops it worked fine but on my girlfriends it is short by like 20 pixels on one side so that area is just black, it is worth the compromise for the increased game performance but kind of annoying.

Here is a link that will modify the desktop drivers to work on your laptop:
http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/

There are pre-built packages out there with everything already modified also. A bit of googling should turn them up.

-Alan

Gonzo.. Don't listen to these canned answers. Check under help ->about second life and see what SL thinks your grafics card is. My guess it will be incorrect.

I have the same card and pretty much the same issue. Saddly, for me it has lasted over a year and has been degrading ever since. What started out as a couple of minutes an hour is now since .11 I have 5 min of 40+ fps -> 5min 1fps ->5min 40+fps -> 5min of 1fps -> rinse and repeat.

I have been bugging sl tech support since this happened and the last reply has been "this is a known issue, nothing we can do." After that I would have bought a new system if I knew which country I'd be in for an extended amount of time.

WoW, EQ2, Civ4, ect all run fine.

You are correct sir. This is completely incorrect. Clinet appears to be working well with latest update. Will post updates as I work though future issues here.

Re-firewall and anti-virus. Thanks -- I keep my system running bare and clean when necessary.

start / run / dxdiag

(enter)

, woila theres your pc info,
SL ingame isnt to reliable as it cant detect all -.-

As Luth said, the client incorrectly detects the card, which I confirmed. This may be related to the issues we are both experiencing.

The actual card is the radeon mobility 9000, from the title of the thread.

I'll post any successes and new info as I find it!

but when I read this, I feel kind of lucky. I don't have abnormal lag problems; it lags when I'm in a busy area but it always did. I also didn't observe anyone breaking in half except on the 1.12 testing grid which I tried once - this worries me about future updates...

I have the hacked desktop drivers installed so many that is helping.

I do have one problem that is frustrating me a lot even though I am lucky compared to the original poster - avatars rez but don't stay rezzed so well anymore. When I look at an avatar they rez, but soon after I look away, the texture that looked fine just before goes back to really bad fuzzy textures. It's impossible for me to see two avatars rezzed at the same time. It doesn't happen to my own avatar - that appears rezzed. I'm not sure whether this has to do with my graphics card at all, or whether they changed something in the avatar rezzing behaviour that hurts when you're on graphics card without a lot of memory like mine?

The funny thing is that this doesn't seem to be happening to prims - prims skirts rez and stay rezzed much better.

Oh by the way, the about second life is reporting a weird card for me as well:

Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: FireMV 2400 PCI DDR x86/SSE2

but it's possible it's confused because I installed the desktop drivers?

Tim, Could you describe the 'hacked desktop drivers' a bit more? Perhaps that would help me as well.Nope, that is what the client reports for me as well -- I am using relatively old and standard drivers.

I'm afraid someone helped me install them and I'm not sure where I got them anymore... It might be that I got them here (I googled this):

http://www.omegadrivers.net/

but I'm not sure anymore, sorry I couldn't be more helpful..