Video Card Problems, ick.

So I am in Washington, visiting my family for christmas. Using my old computer from when I used to live there. Everytime I try to play SecondLife, I get this message...

"Your video card appears to be a GDI Generic, which Second Life does not support.

Second LIfe requires a video card with 32 Mb of memory or more, as well as multitexture support. We explicitly support nVidia GeForce 2 or better, and ATI Radeon 8500 or better.

If you own a supported card and continue to recieve this message, try updating to the latest video card drivers. Otherwise look in the secondlife.com support section or e-mail technical support

You can try to run Second Life, but it will probably crash or run very slowly. Try anyway?"


And I click Yes, and it gives me this...


"Second Life is unable to run because your video card drivers are out of date ot unsupported. Please make sure you have the latest video card drivers installed.

If you continue to revieve this message, contact customer service."


Ick, okay. I actually bought a new video card a long time ago, A few years. It's called ATI RADEON VE DDR. Since I am assuming it is an older driver than 8500, I am wondering if I need to buy a new video card all together or if I could just update it.

I used the advice given to me from the error message and went to

http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html

I saw they had downloads for RADEON, but it was all greek to me...

So...If I only need to update my driver, could somebody direct me to the one to download?
Or is that just a waste of time because I need a new driver.

Thanks for your help...I am usually decent with computers but never able to understand the whole driver thing. :/

I think that card is too old period. Even if you get SL to run the most you can do is face the floor and chat. SL's minimum requirements is really like a 1.2 Ghz processor, 512mb RAM, and a Geforce 4 Ti or equivalent graphics card. Anything lower and your luckly if you can walk around while looking at the ground in mouse look mode.

"Your video card appears to be a GDI Generic, which Second Life does not support."

I can get that with my other pc that has a 6800gt card, if i install certain drivers SL so dont like, you should check if you can use www.omegadrivers.net ones, if you want to see what your pc is buildt up from you can do this

click Start - run - dxdiag (enter)

On the first page it says
Bios :
Processor : xxxx
Memory : xxxx

Display 1 (2)
Device
Name : vid card info here
Apporx total memory : should be least 64 (32 is -.- ouch in SL)

ati > http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati/win2k_xp.php

Okay so I went to look at the DirectX Diagnostic Tool...


64.0 MB Display Memory
1.4 Ghz processor
384 MB of RAM

So I think everything is decent, except my Ram may be too low. But it would still work with low ram I think, just not as fast...
The driver seems to have the min. requirements..but I guess SL is picky :/

I just finished downloading the driver from Omega so I'll restart and see if it helps.



**EDIT**
Okay I restarted and tried running SL
and it said the same error except instead of saying Generic it said Radeon 7000

and it asked if I wanted to try to run SL anyways, and I said yes.

and this time...It actually went to the login page! So we're getting somewhere..

It said my video card was out of date and I should download the Catalyst 3.8.
So I'm going to look for that and hopefully, this will work out.

Thank you for all of your help!!!!

Okay so I went to the ATI site and they didn't have Catalyst 3.8 :/

Soo..I tried playing SL without it
and I can see everybody and myself and I can look at my inventory, friends list, world map...But Everything around me is gray..I feel blind lmao. I actually got stuck in a room for a good 5 min until I could find the door to get out. eek.

Ahh well, guess I'll have to buy a new video card or wait until I fly back home.

I also get the advice to download Catalyst 3.8 for my Radeon card, but 5.13 is what's current on the site and what I'm using so I just disabled the warning.

I downloaded that too!
But it said it was Radeon 7000.
And it needs at least Radeon 8500...
So..WTF! :[

with a first gen 256bit 3d card and only 32mb of memory your lucky to get into the game.

Secondlife's requirements requre atleast a 2nd gen card, and the models listed usually have twice as much ram.

now please, im not saying this as a generic awnser... alllow me to explain

i have 2 aging pc's with windows on them... the one i use the most (for windows) is a amd athalon running @ 1.9 real ghz, 1.5gb of ram and a GeForce2 GTS pro (second gen card, and yea im getting a new one soon)with 128mb of ram and its been heavly modded...

in sl i run 1280x1024 5-16 fps(in a normal social setting) 128m distance and texutres take turns fuzzing out now and again.

the other computer, which is my in house mp3 server but it has windows too, is a amd athalon 1.333 real ghz, 512mb of ram and a geforce ddr, with 32mb of ram. out of sadistic curiosity i loaded up Secondlife (i think 1.6 something) and altho after some fiddling it ran, the best i could do is walk around in a sea of (then) invisible biuldings and talk to grey avatars.

I then traded cards and the computers naturally reversed.

so anyway thats my 2cents

Download the latest Catalyst drivers if you dont already have them. There is a very good possibilty that the drivers will reject your card, due to its age. There is hope for this. There is a free tool called the dhmod utility that will "crack" the driver installer. Unfortunatly this has to be done manually, but the file includes a simple set of instructions on how it works. If you still need help with it, post here, and I will try to help as I can.

I hope this (slightly complicated) process helps you to run SL =)

depending on your machine is it worth the 30$ headache?

Oh btw, do you have AGP Acceleration OFF? I hear ATI's run like crap with that on.

Dear Ron,

From my experience, the AGP Graphics box is grayed out on any and all ATI card-based machines.

Yours,
Mika Kyubi (Muromachi)
Kitsune-at-Large
(Who wants her name KYUBI back!!!)

That's funny. I run Athlon 1.3GHz with 768MB RAM and a GeForce2 MX400 (32MB RAM), and have no problems with SL save for slow rezzing. It might take me an extra couple of minutes compared to everyone around me, but so what? It works fantastically for me, so long as I have all my preferences set properly. The only real issue is 'video bleed,' where after doing something graphics-intense (prim building for example) most of the screen turns a bright, washed out yellow. Restart the client and it's fine, though.

There should be an explanation in Preferences for why this is, because I've seen it confuse many Resis with ATI cards.

From what I understand, Torley, it has something to do with ATI's incorrect implementation of the Open-GL standard. From what I hear, their drivers are non-compliant to these standards, a fact backed up by information posted to other, non-SL sites and forums. I am guessing that one of the noncompliance points may be in some sort of command (I'm stretching here, as I'm not a programmer) used to turn on the card's full use of AGP acceleration. Again, though, keep in mind this is a non-programmer's speculation, not an expert opinion.

Yours,
Mika Kyubi (Muromachi)
Kitsune-at-Large
(Who wants her PROPER name of KYUBI in SL)

Thanxies Mika! That was lovely!

Yeah, in the Prefs, right under that AGP acceleration checkbox, it should say something like "Only compatible with Nvidia" with a link to a page with more details if someone wants to know more.

Yeah its a pretty simply reason actually, ATI focused all their efforts on making their cards Direct3D compliant and tossed in OpenGL support to remain compatable with OpenGL based games like Quake3. At the time they made this move it made sense because at the time Direct3D was the big thing with programmers... until OpenGL 1.4 came out wich set the grounds for a better standard in 3D rendering. Now most games use OpenGL 1.5 or 2.0 wich has proven to make better end results. Not to mension it being free, cross platform (Unix/Linux always used OpenGL and now Mac), and untainted by M$ helps alot too. nVidia saw this and focused on OpenGL as their main nich while maintaining good Direct3D support to maintain compatability. Honestly if someone could get a Direct3D emulator like SciTech GLDirect to work right with SL the ATI users would have less problems.

Have you updated your motherboard and Direct X drivers? Older machines run into this a lot, make sure all your drivers are up to date. a 1.3 AMD is plenty fast enough to run SL, just not at 30 fps at the welcome area. I would recommend looking around for a used Nvidia 5500 cheap or if you got a computer using buddy or two see if they may have one laying around.

CPU: 0.13 micron Intel Pentium 4 (2194 Mhz)
Memory: 1023 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
OpenGL Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL Renderer: GeForce FX 5500/PCI/SSE2 128MB
OpenGL Version: 2.0.1


This is what im Running and I have no issues except for lag sometimes and blurry textures for a minute.