Nvidia 6800 Ultra (Mac) - Av, GUI and texture corruption

I've just started using SL on a new computer with a different graphics card and am seeing some graphics corruption lately. I wondered if anyone has seen anything similar and can shed any light ?

The new card is an Nvidia 6800 Ultra 256Mb AGP 8X, in a Power Mac G5. The old system had an ATI Radeon 8500, which didn't show any such problems.

The sort of things I am seeing occur only when swinging round or zooming the camera, and either correct after a pause or persist until I click on my surroundings and/or reposition camera again - it most commonly happens whilst inside a building. The effects are as follows and may occur singly or in combination :

1. clothes or parts of clothes vanishing from my Av.
2. textured objects showing an incorrect multiple tiling of their texture - pictures, furniture etc.
3. skin features blanking out on a custom photo skin
4. scary(!) looking teeth texture appearing on face of photo skin (maybe related to 2)
5. the whole GUI interface, chat windows, buttons etc, suddenly becomes a broken pixellated mess

I'm going through a process of turning things off and fault finding, but wondered if anyone had any ideas and pointers based on the above ? Specific settings that may be most relevant etc... ?

I did notice that turning off bump and cloth rendering for avatar didn't remove the problem but did help things refresh automatically rather than having to keep clicking and/or moving to correct the view.

If I turn on the Avatar Vertex option, my Av vanishes altogether, leaving only shadows and attachments.

Is it likely perhaps that the drivers for the Nvidia 6800 Ultra, particularly the brand new Mac version, are still buggy ?

Many thanks for any suggestions whatsoever


EDIT : driver update made no difference, neither does turning down graphic settings. I have now found that the effects above ONLY occur when I have objects attached to my avatar.

sorry I am not helping but, is your G5 the new one with the dual processor? and what do you think about the Nvidia 6800? I have a G5 also, but mine came with the ATI card, and I was wondering if I should invest in the Nvidia card..

Thank you!

Hello henri, or should I say bonjour ?

Yes, my Mac is actually the dual 2.5Ghz model, and so far no water leaks from the cooling system

The card seems extremely fast in graphic rendering but so far I have not assessed it in detail.

It depends really if the ATI (9600XT?) that you have is running well enough with SL. There is the apparently well-known "Nvidia works better with SL than ATI" factor to bear in mind which may influence your buying decision.

So I understand, the 6800 Ultra drivers for OS 10.3.5 are early-release, incomplete and buggy such that the benchmarking for this card has not been as good as it should be. Apparently new driver and OpenGL updates in 10.3.6 are supposed to address some of this - I'm waiting on the update with interest..

It may be that the problems I described above are related to this as the rendering of my whole GUI, also mine and other people's avatars, go crazy at random, as if the whole SL client is affected - I now have a suspicion it may be related to these incomplete drivers and the Quartz Extreme technology. I haven't spoken to anyone else using a G5 + 6800 combination on SL at present.

There is also the slightly less expensive 6800 GT model coming out soon to consider.

Sorry I can't really help by quantifying anything right now, but you may find some benchmarks on the web, there is a comparison of the 6800 and the ATI 9800 at : http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/Graphics/mac_6800ultra_review/index.html

Take care

Dee