Intel 945GM driver upgrade = ten seconds to crash every time

I've been playing on my Toshiba A135 with the Intel 945GM video chipset without issue until this latest driver upgrade. Ever since installing it, I cannot keep a connection to SL for more than ten seconds. It crashes, sends you a bug report and I get to lather, rinse, and repeat.

I can't roll back, because other applications require that upgrade to function properly.

Any ideas on why SL doesn't like the upgrade, or thoughts on what to do to try and fix it?

SL doesn't support the Intel card so this is a potential problem for all Intel users. one thing to try is completely uninstall SL and reinstall it so it can detect the new drivers correctly.

well that's the odd part. it worked just fine until i updated to the new driver. and alas, uninstalling and reinstalling didn't help.

is there some reason why they're not supporting intel's chipset? you'd think with the increasing commonality of onboard video and the rather common presence of the intel chipset for laptop users, that would be a bit of a poor business decision.

Same reason they're not supporting ISA 1 MB Video Cards. Intel's video chips are "bare neccessities". SL is not a "bare neccessity" application by any means.

I might fire up my ol' cheapy Dell Laptop & see if it still runs SL? Last time it was SO choppy. HEH!

virtual playgrounds and any manner of entertainment activity are, at best, luxuries. the assumption that customers have or should have the motivation to spend over and beyond the choise to purchase your product is, at best, foolhardy.

perhaps the company is in such wonderful shape that it can afford to alienate new business. (shrug) i downgraded to free and likely will leave if it turns out there is no interest in being 'open' across certain baselines of technologies.

i'm sure it won't matter to them and let's face it, it will only matter to me for a brief while. about as long as it takes to shake my head as i'm walking to get another cup of coffee.

its not LL fault you dont have a 3d accelerated video card that meets the requirements

they are not asking for much, i run SL on my other computer with a geforce 2 i bought in 2001 and a good framerate

if you want to be dissapointed with someone i suggest you look at who made your PC, intel is notorious for thinking they are infauluable

fact is, as good as their cpu's can be every other thing they make is total crap (gotta cut cost somewhere for those 3 pages of ad's in rolling stone)

their chipsets are slow, their video cards barley meet VESA standards set in the early 90's, they make the cpu, and tru plam rubbing and backscracthing with major PC companies force their "other" parts into the low end / mobile pc market

now the dude @ compu-store probally is just as uninformed as you when it comes to the details

example, HP sells a basic celeron desktop, it comes with that good ol intel video card, which works great for word processing, showing photos and other general desktop use

so does the trident video card i bought NEW for 1us$ and it even that does it faster

meanwhile the next step up features an AMD processor, not starting a cpu war here but AMD doesnt have these types of arrangements, if they did you would get at LEAST a ATI radieon, since AMD now is in bed with ATI

but again since they are not soooo tied up with a chipset god complex the manufacture is free to choose what to use, in the case of hp you get a NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE, and its only 40$ more, or about the same cost as a 6200 if you just bought the card

its tons faster in 2d applications, and its fully OpenGLv2 AND DirectX 9 compatible, the intel video barley bost DirectX8 compatibility, its more in the range of DX7 for decent performance and image quality (circa 1997)

again you joe user, and the sales person dont understand this, the pc companies give you less than a sentence and maby a sticker @ the store, you see the tv ad's sayint BUY INTEL and the pc that says INTEL VIDEO, 2+2= badass when it is infact not even close, they just make good cpu's

so you can hardly blame LL for requiring what is standard issue on most other PC's, including upper end intel machines, blame the marketing department of the pc maker and intel

One of the biggest improvements with the new gerneation of Client Viewers is the upgrading of the rendering pipelines, everyone moaned about textures etc no rezzing for years.. well now they snap in quickly for me.... great upgrade... BUT... if you insist on running the game on unsupported GC's what do you really expect?

My biggest issue with LL, is that have not raised the minimum specs for playing the game realisticly, for the past 3 years.. who are they kidding?... more to the point, who are you kidding?

Read this Thread... /111/1f/106305/3.html

Thanks for missing the point -- you know, the one where it worked fine until the latest driver upgrade?

A decision not to support what is a common chipset in the market, especially for mobile users, especially when mobile computing is the one area of the PC market that isn't slowly flatlining is just silly.

There's no need to engage in the e-peen measuring to make what is, essentially, a very simple point -- you can play with technology that requires additional investment to even consider you, or you can present a product that is built to make ease of access and use market friendly.

Not supporting a chipset that's number one for marketshare in the industry is, at best, foolish. But then, more than one company has run themselves in the ground in the erroneous notion that they were going to make the market run after them. (shrug)

So ok, SecondLife wants the highly niche and volatile segment of market made up of early adopters (who also happen to be the segment with the highest erosion rate). Good luck with that... really.

(Supporting factoid: In the fourth quarter of 2006, AMD/ATI had 10 percent of the chipset market, putting them in about fourth place behind INTEL (1), Nvidia (2), and slightly behind Via (3), a Taiwanese chipset maker.)

Downgraded to free and maybe if I get another desktop, I'll be back. Maybe.

(shrug)

I don't believe anyone has missed the point... SL has NEVER supported the Intel Graphics chip.. and I have no idea who gave you the impression Intel is the 'number one for marketshare' information.. they are lying to you... in the CPU market, yes agreed, but not in the Graphics Chip market.. lol.. they are a 'new kid on the block'.. cashing in on the success in the CPU market... their graphics chips are only considered 'generic' at best.. use them for general graphics and they may please you, use them for anything other than a wordprocessor and they fall over bigtime.

So here's a question, rather than starting a new thread.

I have a Toshiba Tecra with the Intel 945GM thingie. Yeah, I know. It sucks, but it ran SL for a while. I realize that the update sorta overtook the capabilities of this thingie and now SL crashes the whole comp all the time. I totally understand that and am in the process of getting a new laptop (s'gotta be a laptop, unfortunately, due to work and other constraints).

My question is: In the meantime, what can I do? I've updated drivers yaddayadda. I know the Intel 945GM isn't any good for SL.

Can I get another graphics card installed into this comp? Is there any other weird tweak secret I can use to get me through until my new comp gets here (takes a while), or do I just gotta suffer until then?

Any of you computer doctors got anything for me? *grin*

(In case you couldn't tell from my incredibly technical usage of the word "thingie", I know very little about computers. I can use 'em, but all the guts? Yeah... not so much.)

The Intel 945GM is a Mobile Graphics Chip.. hence the GM suffix.. which means its welded onto the motherboard.

Thankya. I didn't know that. Like I said, I don't know anything about hardware.

so roll it back



thats like saying so and so is #1 in the music industry, they might make a killer drumset, but their pianos blow, in this case intel makes a killer durm but a crappy piano for the same prince as the NVIDIA stienway



im currently writing an article, sorta like a cause and effect for pc performance and SL my test computer, made up of spare parts and freebeies is under the SUPPORTED hardware, 99% of it is date stamped either 1999 or 2000 (and gets suprisingly good performance) so this stuff is hardly brand new neice stuff, it may have been in 1996 but hardly today

again when a 499 compaq laptop comes with a supported ati radeion and your 1200$ toshiba doesnt, you need to ask toshibia some questions



again look at the chipset market

intel is # 1 becuase they make graphics, cpu's, lan controlers, io controlers, nand gates, flipflops, octal encoders and litterly thousands of other intergrated circuits that counts as "chipsets", and they get outragous with their marketing arrangements

amd is #2 becuase they make cpu's, lan controlers mcu's, now ATI video cards and litterly hundreds of other intergrated circuit products that counts in the "chipset market"

NVIDIA comes in next becuase they only make 2 products video cards and io controlers for computer systems

VIA comes in last becuase they just are not out there enugh, s3 graphics are just as bad as intel, altho via has some great cpu chipsets and have dominated the gamer pc market for years




hope you return

Synchronicity Writer don't feel to bad, we don't all have the intel video chipset, but there are an awful lot of us that also crash out over and over again. This same thing is going on with NVidia and ATI as well. I have updated my drivers twice, uninstalled sl 2-3 times done all the tips I can find about how to keep from crashing and still I'm logging in 20 times every 30 min. As far as I can tell it's been a serious issue for many of us since the 1.14 update

I have a Dell Latitude D520 with the same video card as the original poster (Intel 945GM). The laptop is brand new and SL never worked on it. At first, the game opens, but when I try to choose any option from the menu, it crashes. Is there really no solution to this?

using unsupported hardware is totally a dice roll

I have been using a IBM Lenovo notebook to build big marvelous things in SL since about last November. It uses an integrated Intel 945 chipset. I also had to roll back about 4 driver versions to get the graphics to pan smooth without any jerking. That was until somewhere about 2 SL client upgrades ago. Whatever they added into the Client now uses up way more RAM, and seems to have a mem leak that is making huge hard drive swap files. But I noticed what seemed like the new client loading video objects beyond what it is actually showing. Meaning before, if you set your view to 64m the video system oomph and the associated RAM usage would not become overloaded by too many objects beyond that point. Now it seems like even though you have your view limit set to 64, if you stand still for too long in one place, it tries to load up all the objects in the whole simm or something, even though you are not trying to see past 64m. This seems to kill the Lenovo after about a few minutes now with repeated lockups that it never had before. I have had to switch to an Athlon 64 notebook that uses a separate mobility radeon 9700. It goes good for about 4 or 5 hours if you dont idle in one place for too long without moving because then the swap file seems to grow huge. But the key thing is it has a separate video system that does not kill the whole notebook when the video load goes ballistic with heavy SL content like the integrated chip set seems to do. To get the Lenovo to perform I had to have cache size set to about 50, the mesh sliders mostly down, video ram size set to 32meg, particles 2048 max, view Full Screen (not in a window), view range 64m, etc etc. Good luck, it might be time to upgrade to a more powerful note. But then you can keep your old one logged onto SL Exchange

Having particles set at 2048 is way overkill... try setting that to 250 as a max will make a difference to performance, mine is set to 0, I can only take so much bling. I also set fog distance to 2.0 with a draw range of 64, you should notice a difference. 50mb Cache is a bit lean, especially when you add up all the texture files SL caches, if you have the free space, set that to 1gb and defrag your HD regularily.

I see your point completly maybe its because im having the same issue..

I have a sony vaio with the intel 945 chipset. I have had this lptop for well over a year now and it hasran great with sl. Much faster then most. then about 2 updates ago it has been a pain.. Sl crashes my whole pc and I get errors saying that the device drive has stopped..

I know it was a risk I took but it was the best pc for what I needed at the time.

The point that is trying to be asked is why now.. what has changed with the last updates?

simple.. instead everyone gets all rude and tech.

I hate to dig up a slightly old post...but it just begged a bit of a technical reasoning behind WHY SecondLife no longer works on the Intel 95XGM series of GPUs.

1) The series of cards are onboard, or built into the system. They can't be replaced, and as such age very poorly generally.

2) The series of cards have 0 memory. This isn't a joke, or a lie. Feel free to check it. While it does have direct access to the memory it uses, it's still using the system memory. This means that it's subject to the system bus issues with most games. Higher quality (read: not neccessarily newer) cards have onboard memory, which has a shorter path than the system memory as it never has to cross the sytem bus to be utilized.

3) The series of cards have NO hardware 3D acceleration. The support OpenGL and DirectX at the system level. All this means is that the CPU is handling all of the graphics, while the graphics card is simply making it viewable on your screen. Another issue is that the driver utilizes the CPU to interperet and direct these calls to locations in the system memory, which is commonly known to be slower than graphics card memory for various reasons. Go look on google if you don't believe me.

4) SecondLife has an "emulation mode" for most unsupported cards. What this is remains purely hypothetical unless LL tells us exactly how it works, but suffice it to say, it likely means that things are running in a less than optimum way.

Now, I understand you don't want to upgrade. However, LL does. They want to make SL prettier, add features, and move with the times. You simply can't keep everyone happy if you want to do that. I bought my laptop 2 1/2 years ago and it came with an Intel 955GM. I'm surprised manufacturers are still using the 945. If you bought the laptop more than 2-3 years ago, you're going to suffer the same problem in almost every game you try to play. I understand your frustration. SL runs at about 3 frames per second on my laptop with the defaults, if that. You have to be reasonable though. What you're asking for is basically asking for SL to run on a system built 10-12 years ago. I know yours wasn't, but it's the same difference technology-wise, as the series of card is considered "value" or "workstation" quality. It's not designed for games. To be honest, you should be happy it even starts without saying basically "buy a new video card." Were I you, I would likely check EBay or newegg.com for a good deal on a new/use laptop that can run SL effectively. Yes, it will cost you money. You will also get a system capable of running many games you can't right now, however. If all you do game-wise is play SL, then perhaps SL just won't work for you any longer. I hope that's not the case. In either case, I wish you the best of luck.

it is simple, intel does not make a video card that is 100% complient with open GL or DirectX, the entire point of these standards is so that software designers dont have to spend their lives making 10000001 versions of the same software for each video card, sound card, joystick, modem or nic on the market


now what happened is either

A: linden labs made a change in their graphics engine, that was within open GL spec, to make more efficient use of open gl complaint adapters, giving us either better or faster graphics

or

B: intel made changes to their driver set, which pushed what little compliance they did have right out the window


reason why ppl get so pissy about explaining this is (at least for me) theres SOMEONE every damn day crying that their intel video card doesnt work, and then theres a 50% chance that they will turn around and attack us for the fact they didnt look at the system requirements, or bother to read the side of the box their computer came in (its listed right there)

its not linden labs fault, its not my fault, and its really not intels fault that someone didnt even bother to look before they ploped down 1100$ (which will get you a laptop with a pimp ati or nvidia card)

I don't have intel graphics, and I made a point of only buying a computer with a proper nvidia graphics (which crashes in vista since 1.16 but that's not what I'm here to talk about).

As a point of policy, and for all the scoffing and STFU about intel graphics, I'm surprised Linden Lab aren't working more on this- because it does (or did ) work. I read about people managing to get SL running on old mac minis and stuff. With the 90% dropout rate from signups, I have to wonder how many are because they're on less snazzy computers.

For Second Life to expand worldwide, it has to work on the world's computers. That means either waiting for everyone to get graphics cards, or making SL work on what the world's computers have. In all the bargain laptop adverts I see, that means intel graphics. Graphics that did work, and could probably work better with some effort put into it.

I would expect them to go out and buy a cheap PC with crappy graphics and prod SL until it runs well on it. If they're serious about increasing useage.

Laptops are NOT gaming machines.... never were, will probably never will be... thats not their niche market.

LL has to make money, bottom line. Catering to low end computer users isn't going to help LL make money nearly as well as offering a rich virtual world to those who can easily afford it. The sad fact is Joey Troglodyte on his Pentuim 166 with a 1 meg Trident video card can't afford to spend money in SL even though you could offer SL to 90% of all operating personal computers in the world.

LL has spent a lot of time and effort keeping Intel chips able to run SL, there are a lot of tweaks in the code and a default Intel load parameter set, its just that LL can't afford to cripple SL. If you look on almost all game boxes now days it plainly states that Intel graphics are unsupported and may or may not work. Since Intel and Microsoft sleep in the same bed, Intel has no real desire to support OpenGL fully since DirectX is just spiffy by them. ATI suffered the same problems for years until Megagames like Doom3 (OpenGL ) showed them the folly of their ways as gamers ripped out their crash-tastic 9800 pros and bought shiny new Nvidia cards that could deliver Doom3 in all it's glory and swore off ATI forever.

My Rock Extreme CTX Pro begs to differ.

Second Life does, and did run on Intel graphic laptops. Acceptably well, from some accounts. With a little programming work it may even work very well, regardless of what labels people put on things.

It only has to be good enough. It doesn't have to be amazing.