Problem with Problem with Core Duo or new ATI graphics?

I've just upgraded laptops, and have found that I am practically unable to run SL on my new laptop.

My original machine was a Pentium M 1.6GHz machine with ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 graphics. The new machine has a Core Duo processor (2 x 2.16GHz processors) and ATI Mobility FireGL 5200 graphics. Both systems have 2GB of RAM, and plenty of spare disk. Both are attached to SL via the same network connections (2Mb/s from home, several Gb/s from work). Both are Windows XP Pro SP2 with all the fixes applied.

SL works fine on my original laptop, though its clearly limited by the rendering capabilites of the graphics system. Its currently working as well as it ever has, while on the new (freshly installed) system the login process takes several minutes, and once logged in, performance is so slow as to be unusable (many seconds, sometimes even minutes, per frame). To all intents and purposes, the SL client is hung.

I have been swapping between the systems, and this behavior is reproducible. I conclude that there is a problem with the SL client and either the dual core processor, or the newer ATI graphics card/device driver in my new laptop. I have tried setting processor affinity for the SL client, but this has made no difference.

Any suggestions / recommendations / pointers to where I should report a bug welcomed, as would be posts with supporting information from anyone else who is having similar problems running the SL client with either this graphics system, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo, or multiprocessor systems in general.

FireGL is not supported

Acutally (from the website):

The following cards have not been tested with Second Life, and compatibility is not certain:
nVidia cards that report as Quadro
ATI cards that report as RADEON IGP or RADEON XPRESS
ATI cards that report as FireGL
ATI cards that report as FireMV

Not explicitly 'not supported' but rather 'not tested'.

Tomato , Tometo , something,

ATI cards that report as a FireGL have not been tested with Second Life, and compatibility is not certain.

Just another word for
"we dont want to support it , so we're not testing it either"

Look for the games that support fireGL, its not much, so trying it on SL would be up to you, doubt it will ever work, id mark it not supported even if SL is cloudy about it, wich they love to bury things where new users cant find it.

Anyone seen recommended system specs before you download SL ?, cause its not easy availible.

Thanks for the pointer to this. In these days of OpenGL and DirectX it never even occured to me that they would actually be trying to do things that would require lower level access to the hardware, and so need specific hardware types.


I never found any obvious recommendations ... but when I tried it on my old machine, it just worked

Sadly however, I guess that this is the end of SL for me when I get rid of my old machine in the next week or so. This new laptop absolutely rocks for everything else I do, and that includes the stuff that pays the bills ...

Thanks again for the help.

If its a problem with the FireGL then its most likely a driver issue and not a hardware issue. Almost all FireGL chips (ecspecially in Laptops) are the exact same chips as Radeons. Radeon versions just have some things disabled. Even Dell has a single motherboard design in the Precision M20 that is exactly the same as the Latitude D610... they both have FireGL physical chips, but if you flash a Latitude bios on it, the chip reports as a Radeon X300, flash the Precision bios onto it and it reports as a FireGL.

Hey! I've got a Latitude d610, and I'm using it right now...

and so I am confused by your statement about the graphics stuff..

my system always says something about the dreaded Intel integrated graphics, and while SL does not break any speed records on this lappy, it does work.

What am I missing?

~Jenni~

I found out that there are some 3rd party drivers for ATI cards. These appear to be based on the basic Catalyst driver set from ATI, for desktop GPUs, that are then patched and hacked so they work with any of the ATI chipsets, including the Mobility FireGL. I tried the Omega set, which you can find here: http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati/win2k_xp.php

They provide access to a lot of extra tweaks and features, but more importantly, they work with SL.

As you'd expect, no warranty, no guarantees. Anything you may do to your machine with these things is at your own risk, blah blah blah. In addition I have no idea what the legal situation is with these drivers, and I have no association with the author, apart from now being a user of his code.

Personally, I'd be much happier if the SL client just supported my card, but until I run into worse problems with these Omega drivers, its a useful stopgap solution to the problem that allows me to continue to use SL. I hope that this information might be of use to someone else.

My problem was definately with my ATI graphics card: The new Omega drivers have done the trick perfectly. I have NEVER been able to use SL and my home laptop with ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 - it ALWAYS crashed on logging in. Now I can SL at home and at work!

I was a bit sceptical at first - but it was worth it!

Thanks a million...

Hiyas. I have a mobility FireGL V5200 too, and SL works, even though some bugs show up specially with FirstLook.
I know that FireGL are not tested to be supported by SL, I tried to install the Omega drivers right now, and it sees my videocard as a mobility Radeon X1600 in winXP, but when i launch SL i get drivers aren't supported or up to date and viewer shuts down...
Any tips for the ones with FireGL cards who tweaked into Radeon?