ATI Cat 4.1 Drivers Out

Want something to do while SL is down? Go download the new Catalyst 4.1 drivers.

**deleted**

I'll try em out later today and give a report

I went and tested the Cat 4.1 drivers, being completely optimistic as I always am. I spend about 20 minutes in-world without any texture corruption in either the particles or the usual textures. I tried my hardest to get as many stuffed into view as possible, but nothing happened!

"This must be the end of an era!" I thought. Could it be possible that ATi actually went back and fixed their retarded little problem they created back in 3.2? Could it be that all those e-mails we sent had finally been read and replied to?

Then 30 seconds later everything broke down. I got the usual texture glitches (striped wood, black animation, square particle blurs) and held back crying...

Alas, the new drivers do jack squat as far as I can see. Maybe they hold the corruption back, but in the end, the corruption wins.

of course they don't fix SL silly, thats LL's job, more than 75% of the bugs 'common' to ATI in SL are in the SL codebase, not ati's, believe me

Something seems to have broken my shiny, shiny only appears on parts of the object closest to the camera, leaving the rest only greyed a little, anyone else having this?

Oh btw I did install the drivers, no major improvements, only thing different seems to be shiny.

::CRY!!!::

C'mon LL, this is an entirely new Driver version, something is definately wrong with the picture you guys are painting of ATI. I wanna play SL 'like it's meant to be played'

==A saddened Chris

OK, based on my 5 minutes of testing, it appears that the Catalyst 4.1 drivers have fixed at least one fairly major bug.

In particular, it fixes issues with avatar vertex programs causing serious problems in the UI and sky (white triangle flashing everywhere). Turning on avatar vertex programs should dramatically increase your frame rate. I'd suggest trying to turn them on - if you see any problems, please file a bug report, noting that you're using the Catalyst 4.1 drivers.

Neither I or ATI currently have any concrete idea as to what's causing the texture corruption, yet - it has been very difficult for both us and them to reproduce, unfortunately - our dynamic texture allocation never does the same thing twice. It also appears to be VERY hardware and software configuration dependent - I haven't seen it on my development system in the last couple of months.

We're still looking into the full screen anti-aliasing issue (screen turning black) - at this point, it hasn't been determined yet if that's the result of us or the drivers that are doing something bad.

- Doug

well first off i do thank you guys alot for tryin with this.. i know i can get a lil bitter sometime but its outta frustration that i (as an openGL developer in the first life dealy) can't really help enough to make it go away...

now as to the stuff here... i've spent pretty much all night going over some of these issues and i found out alot more about them (specifically the texture corruption and the fsaa blackout)




okay this one i've *really* nailed down.


in three words...


its the mouse


now i'll explain myself on this... if you enable FSAA through ati's driver controlls... and launch SL... you'll notice its basically black.. but you do occasionally get flickers of a *working* fsaa'ed SL showing through... most sepcifically when clicking a mouse button.

This intrigued me abit and i tried a few different things, starting with launching the game without the mouse pointer at all (aka launching it windowed from the keyboard, and keeping the mouse pointer out of the SL window at all times.

Interestingly.. doing this kept the game viewable, and everything looked great with the smooth fsaa as i moved my avatar around WASD style. intrigued i moved the mouse over to click on something and BAM... instant blackness



now i also noted clicking alot, really rapidly, flickers the game viewable.. and occasionally can even sorta 'stick' it viewable for a second or two... WHILE its viewable... if you move the mouse out of the window.... it will stay viewable, you can go back to moving around, interacting etc... and everythings fine until you move the mouse back and BAM black


really being curious now i managed to do it again.. and this time SLOOOOOWLY moved the mouse around.... as long as the pointer stayed over a 2d screen element, such as the button bar, the menu, an open window touching the edge... everything was cool... the very milisecond that pointer moved out over the 3d world tho BAM back to black again


I thought it might have been the drop shadow behind the cursor (as i know alot of 3d applications disable that, either consciously or unconsciously) but turning them off and repeating my testing yielded the same results...

so it appears to be somehow related to moving the mouse over a 3d screen element... and a mouse click *event* seems to disable or work around whatever is causin the blanking but only for a frame or three.

My advice would be to take a close look at exactly whats going on when a mouse is moved over a 3d screen element (as opposed to a 2d screen element) cause whatevers breakin FSAA seems to be *right* there


i hope this helps doug... i have some of this in a bug report already but obviously the max character limit on bug reports really hurts when ya try an give detailed explanations like this....

buy me Plane tickets to and from there and I'll bring my laptop and show you, no charge, except maybe a soda and some chips

Darque, if you were a software developer, you would know that you can reproduce problems reliably when you are by yourself, but when you try to show it to someone else, it works perfectly.

Unless you are demonstrating software for the boss, in which case it works perfectly when you test it, but fails miserably when you try to demonstrate it.

so sayeth the coding bible, so sayith thy lord
(j/k)

I live by the Tao of Programming.
http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html

-----------------------
Programming is easy: you just type:
void main(void) {
}
then start debugging

Just tried turning the avatar vertex thing back on. I didn't notice any weird-looking avatars or anything. Everything looked fine... But I DID notice the DECREASE in my framerate of about 5fps.

So, off it shall stay for now.

i do know it still has issues when running combined with avatar bump/cloth rendering, produces the same old invalid colors on every other vertex weird rainbow effect on everyone.. i didn't get a chance to check if the face blackout at a distance was fixed

Avatar vertex is back to making people look like Ghostbuster slimed extras, neonness all over no matter what the zoom level is. I didn't check out the blackness on faces, I'll do that next time. In the last version I could see avatars looking normal unless I zoomed at certain levels like if I zoomed too close then they'd go into neonness.

I'm going to do some testing and revert the drivers back to the last version, any suggestions on how to do this? I'm thinking downloading them and installing, but if you do it a different way let me know.

What I'm going to test to see if the drivers really changed anything are for shiny which seems to not be working properly, and the avatar vertex. Since I updated both SL and the drivers before testing for any of these things I really don't know which would be to blame.

That'll teach me to upgrade everything at once!

if you want to do real testing oz, do a blank xp on an old HD and make a restore point before ya install ANY drivers, then install old, test, restore to restore point, install new... test

short of that jus try an set the video adapter back to generic vga between each install, it can be a kinda pain though

Scripting is easy you just type:
default
{
state_entry()
{ }
}
then start debugging.

It is scary how similar that is to how I code.

Good quote, good link.

Crying??? Geez Dave you're the one who's supposed to be telling the rest of us that it'll be OK.

Er, don't worry Dave. It's gonna' be OK. Really. Eventually...

You're a brave man Dave Zeeman. Thank you for being ATI's guinea pig of the month.


Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily; Second Life is but a dream.

Ok, downloaded and installed the 3.10 drivers, found the shiny problem went away, however it still does look different from the previous version, but hey atleast it works.

The problem I had was that shiny would only show on the face of an object that was facing the camera, meaning if I looked at one side of a cube only that side would be shiny and the others would show no effect of it at all, the effect on spheres was odd, like a small window of shiny on the surface that only faced the camera.

After installing the 3.10 drivers the shine is how it should be, objects are shiny on all sides regardless of which one faces the camera. However the ones not facing the camera appear to be duller sometimes, this could be a feature though because it seems the ones facing the sun seem more shiny, I dunno.

I didn't uninstall any drivers, just installed the 3.10 ones, if this messes something up, oops, so far I'm running ok though.

So thats one point for LL and minus one for ATi drivers