ATI Radeon Xpress 200M Support Group

A place for us poor souls getting 2fps with the 200m to try to console each other.

lol
Good idea on starting the thread. This is quite the place for us left behind the the digital dust... o.o;

Anyways, I'll continue to still look into any solutions for our.. problems with the low fps, and perhaps I'll sooner or later run into something or someone that would help us out.

Be sure that you don't have 'Use vertex shaders' on. The 200M offloads vertex shaders back to the CPU instead of doing them in hardware, making what should be a 1 step process into a 3 step one. Also, it seems that this card, for some reason, runs much, much better with terrain detail set to none. This does not provide as big a boost on my radeon 9600, so I assume it must be something with the way that terrain is rendered.

Hey thanks Zodiakos!

My terrain detail was already set to None

I unchecked the avatar vertex shaders and immediately went from 1.5 fps to around 6.5 fps on my wireless connection! and that was in the laggiest part of my land

Venbred, definitely do this..huge improvement!

Turning off the vertex thing helped slightly. BUT.. I don't know how, I was messing around with drivers.. reinstalling.. randomly messing with computer and hardware settings.. no clue what the heck I did but I've been running around 14 - 24 fps now.. No clue what I did though.

>.<

Another thing to note is that it seems like this particular card, from my experience, doesn't have a really high fill rate (lower than some of the 9XXX cards, despite having more features). If you are not using your laptop's default screen resolution (1280x800 for me), and are playing in full-screen, the video card drivers actually have to perform an additional scaling step, which means when you are playing full-screen on these cards, setting the resolution lower than that may actually cause SL to run SLOWER than it would at the higher resolution (crazy, but true). This is actually true of almost every LCD display, even desktop ones, although desktop computers usually have video cards with enough fill rate to make the difference seem negligible (but sometimes ugly...).

Playing in windowed mode can make a big difference, for the better, if you are willing to play in a smaller window. I can't really stand doing that, but it definitely can help, especially if you resize the window to about half size or less.

-edit: Did you have 'Use local lighting' turned on? That's a big nono in general, not just with this card, hehe. Unless you have a really, really respectable computer (with lots of RAM, 1 Gig really doesn't cut it) I'd NEVER touch that setting, at least not until they change how it works completely.

I normally run in windowed mode, but not half size..i have the window maximized

lmao didn't even know this was started as thread, I too use ati Xpress and yea that vertex thing mess FPS quite a bit but since i disabled it everything run fine. I am witing for the newer ati card to come out so I can combine both the Xpress and the high performance card. Dont do what I did though lol I tried running the xpress with a high-end Nvidia..wow did that turn bad

Turning off vertex helped, thanks.

Not much I can do in regards to getting a replacement vid card, since this is a notebook and it shares (read: steals) system memory for its own use. But that helped things enough so its at least somewhat bearable (enough to do some basic things when I'm away from home with that notebook).

Since this particular notebook was purchased specifically without anything in mind other than work stuff (nothing more complicated than OpenOffice perhaps), I'm pleasantly surprised. Now I'm tempted to get a 5400 RPM drive instead of the 4200, but I like over four hours battery life.

Well I have to put in this information. I randomly got mine working but ever since the first startup after that last update that delt with the client and etc. I'm back to square one trying to figure out what's going on. :x

Also all my stuff is either off in the preferences or as low as they can go, and in-game I use debug to crank everything off. Makes me mad that I had it running well and all the sudden nothing. >.<

It's not just you. After the last update, I had problems with both my desktop AND my laptop.

If you haven't already done so, uninstall SL and reinstall it again. Many people have reported the installer corrupting certain files, which causes random crashes, sometimes as often as every 5 minutes. After I did this, it seemed to run fine, but if I'd turn on either Shiny or Ripple water, it would again start crashing after about 30 minutes or so. Turning off ripple water fixed this, but only if I'd restart SL right after turning it off.

This seems to have gone away a little bit for me after that very latest patch, however... it seems pretty much back to normal. I'd still suggest uninstalling SL before installing the newest patch every time, instead of just installing over it. Seems to be the safest way to go about it.

Hello,

I have the Radeon Xpress 200m 32bit video card. Running windows vista
Everytime I try to open second life i get a crash before the login screen opens.
I have tried about every solution I could find.... But nothing has been able to fix my problem...
Can someone please help me here.

thanks