Which ATI Drivers Do I Want? It's Not Very Clear.

I got this comp new in January with these specs: Pentium 4, 3.0 GHz, 1 gig RAM, 250 gig HD, 800 FSB, so it's not a bad machine. However, it has an ATI Radeon X300 SE graphics card. I figured I'd have to upgrade sooner or later, but hoped to put off buying a $400 PCI-E nvidia card for at least six months or so.

I've been playing SL okay with this card since I bought this machine about eight weeks ago, but I've got some problems that are becoming more pronounced lately. My av will freeze up and not be able to move at intervals of about one to three minutes. Also, if she is flying or walking, I will lose control and she will keep moving on her own, flying through walls, sinking into the ground or other surfaces, then rubber-band back to some point before. And then she's frozen for about 20-40 seconds before I can move her again. Flying or moving anywhere that's not a direct teleport can be maddening to the point of pulling out hair. Oh, and also I frequently get the message that I've been logged out of a sim, or I just crash. My settings are pretty low, too, I don't have local lighting, bump mapping, shiny surfaces or that other fancy stuff on.

Since this got unbearable today, I decided to do some troubleshooting. I uninstalled and reinstalled SL and then went to make sure my graphics card drivers were current. I went to ATI's site and dl'ed the one recommended for my card and system, Catalyst 5.3. Then I tried to load SL and got the message from the SL client that my drivers are out of date and I should have the Catalyt 3.8 driver installed. I look around on ATI's site and can't seem to find this driver. Also, I'm confused since I would think 5.3 would be newer than 3.8.

Does anybody have any suggestions? I can still log in to SL, even with this different driver set, but it's even slower, freeze-ier and rubber-band-ier than before. Am I just screwed with this stupid card and should I just go buy a new one?

I run the newest Omega driver (www.omegadrivers.net) and make sure to turn off fastwrite (turn off by default with omega drivers) and VPU Recovery....

Omegadrivers were mention by ATI as good drivers, so don't worry too much...

But if not ATI just release brand new drivers (prev version was fine, tested those, no lock ups), I will try those shortly on my second machine until Omega gets there driver up to date.

Its EXTREMELY hard to say which drivers work with SL for certain cards. Some cards have different revisions with hardware/firmware fixes/updates that work without a glitch, yet the same model card with revision 2 may have issues with SL.

Take Nvidia cards, Nvidia takes all their card drivers, stuffs them into one big update executable file gives it some cryptic version number and tosses it out to the public. Sure they don't have much to change for MY TI4200 card, but the drivers are thrown in with the drivers for the latest cards.

So driver version 6.6.9.3 works fine for my Nvidia card, but not for your newer video card.
My laptop runs the same version for its GeForce2 GO card with 32MB...

Thanks for the recommendation of Omega drivers, Michael, and for the words of commiseration, Millie. I've had somebody point out to me that my rubber-banding and freezing issues may be related to a network issue instead of a graphics card issue. I guess I will give Comcast a poke and see what they have to say about it all; I know they've been upgrading and changing stuff around in my area lately.

Darnit, I have things to do in SL, these technical difficulties are very frustrating.

Hi Beryl,


FWIW, I recently bought a NVidia 6600GT. Those are not 400$, more like 250$, and really really good for SL. They come in PCI-E or AGP8 flavors.

Just pointing out that you DON'T need to shell out 400$ for an high end graphic card. A benchmarking site I use clocks the X300 at a 1300 index, and the 6600GT at 8000. I myself moved from a Nvidia 5200 (index 1100), and it did make a world of difference in frames per second and overal rendering quality.

Best,

Not attempting to be a broken record, but... Are you using wireless networking? If so, have you tried using a direct wired connection? Also, are you using any internet security or firewall software? If so, have you tried disabling it to see if it is interfering with Second Life access?

Part of the problem is that SL is telling people who have upgraded to the newest (vastly superior) catalyst driver that they are using an older driver and should upgrade to at least 3.8. I bug reported this, still broken, go figure.

No wireless networking for me, but I did have Norton running, so that might have been an issue. I finally got tired of the whole ATI/SL problem today and went and bought an nvidia GeForce 6600 GT graphics card (merci beaucoup for the recommendation, Stephane ). So I got my husband to install the card earlier this evening, rubbing my hands in glee in the anticipation of lightning-fast SL speeds.

I did find I had one other problem, though; when we bought this comp a couple months ago, since it is TV-ready, we put a three-way splitter on the cable outlet (one for the regular TV, one for broadband internet and one for TV connection to comp). Before, it had a two-way splitter (one for the regular TV and one for broadband internet). We took the three-way splitter off and put the two-way splitter back on, with much better performance in SL. SL ran okay with the three-way splitter just after I got the computer; heck, I was even able to watch TV and play SL at the same time on the computer. But the performance while just using SL alone has taken a sharp nosedive in the past week or so.

The new card runs SL much better, I have much higher FPS and nice speed and everything. However, I am still finding that I am having moments of freezing and rubber-banding, albeit much more infrequently. I pulled up the SL stats info (alt-1) and watched what is happening, and I noticed that my Comcast cable box is blinking slightly and I'm showing a dip in bandwidth to practically zero when these instances occur. So, I'm thinking something is wonky with my cable connection after all. I will definitely be scheduling a service call from Comcast to check our lines, and I'll probably have another cable outlet installed in this room so I can watch TV on the computer again.

(P.S. And yeah, what Siro said about the ATI drivers message on the SL client is so true, it's just confusing and makes no sense.)

PCI-Express support is kind of wonky at times (more from ATI's end than anything). It's the newest card in a brand-new format, and sometimes the drivers aren't 100%. This is especially true in SL, where we call a few OpenGL functions that ATI never expected us to call.

I know we're working to improve graphics support on our end as best as we can, given what drivers are out there. Most ATI users should be on the newest drivers, but many ATI PCI-Express users have had the best success trying different drivers until they found one that worked best. Sometimes this was the OEM set of drivers on the CD that came with the card...

Catalyst 5.3 fully supports OpenGL 2.0. I'd expect everyone would want that. This should be especially true in SL, considering those function calls that "ATI never expected" SL to call. Please fix the startup message to not recommend 3.8 to 5.3 users.

Catalyst 5.3 appears to have fixed all of my video-related crashes. *knocks on wood*

-Ghoti

I second the Omega Drivers. ATI supports Omega's driver tweaks.

That sounds more like network issues to me. You might want to test your network connection for latency and other issues:

http://www.dslreports.com

Tito

Yeah, it turned out that there was a crimp in the cable wiring; the cable guys were here yesterday and discovered this in the crawl space under our house where the Comcast connection comes in. They also installed another outlet for the broadband internet connection (it was split off the TV connection). They said that the person who originally hooked me up for cable internet service two years ago should have done that.

SL looks pretty darned good now, my connection seems to be fine, and the new nvidia GeForce 6600 GT card makes things look really good. I'm happy as a hog in mud.

Really? Which one?