Buggy!

This thing is horridly bug ridden. I've never had an application crash quite as much as SL has crashed on me! In the past few hours that I've played I must have had to restart the client about 15 times and reboot my machine 4-5 times. This is unacceptable. Is it this bad on other systems or did they just not QA properly with ATI cards

It's mostly ATI's drivers. It's not SL's fault, they've tried everything under the sun to get the Radeons to work. ATI seems to be dragging their feet on the whole issue.

Believe me, I know, I have a Radeon 9000, and there's tons of bugs. But, the Lindens are trying... send a bug report to LL, and also to ATI, to get their attention.

LF

SL was developed in nVidia cards. Trust me, the Lindens don't WANT to have buggy software, they just can't possibly work all the bugs out when ATI keeps releasing new drivers every 5 minutes

And if it was that buggy on everyone's system, there wouldn't be so many people playing. I would reccomend you check that you have your latest drivers.

Yeah, I think EVERYBODY should bug ATi about their issues with Second Life. Let's face it, the 3.1 -> 3.2 Catalyst conversion was what screwed us ATi users over in the first place, so it's obviously ATi's problem, not Linden Lab's.

Infact, I think I'll put up an insta-form on my website with the e-mail of who to send it to.

Hell yeah, I'm doing that right now!!!

Dear Sir or Madame,
It has come to my attention that there is a critical problem in the "Catalyst" driver set which is offered to all users of the "Radeon" series of video cards you sell. This problem occurs in the massively multiplayer online game known as "Second Life", created by Linden Lab. Unfortunately, it seems that there are several occurrences where a player will be crashed out of the game and a few which require the use of the new VPU recovery system. A portion of these errors are caused by AGP, which must be turned off in order to give the game playability. Aside from the crash related errors, there is also a graphical error in the mip-mapping of the game which needs addressing. This error has plagued Second Life ever since the Catalyst 3.1 drivers were upgraded to 3.2, as the change from one to another is incredibly obvious. I hope that this e-mail and any others that you receive on the same subject will help place this problem higher up on your priority list. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely, (insert name here)

Note the fact that you have to insert your name...

I have to check to make sure I got the correct e-mail address. If I receive no reply from it in 24 hours, I'll hand it out. Otherwise, you'll notice if you goto the ATi site that they have some stupid system set up for you to go through if you want to actually e-mail "support" so I'm currently e-mailing the "developer". If anyone thinks I should change the e-mail somehow, lemme know.

I've already done that once. Sign me up I'll spam them good.

I was hit with crashing recenty, CRASH, CRASH, CRASH.

I sent crash reports and then was told to send my log. I did and the almost immediate response was that it was probably a hardware problem and not SL and it was suggested I reseat my video card. The tech came and guess what? It had sprung it's clips and was making contact but barely. He reseated it properly and Voila' !! Not one crash since.

I also have problems with SL and my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. The card runs great though under other OpenGL games like Call of Duty. I e-mailed Linden Labs about my problems and they replied it's an ATI driver bug.

For over a year now ATI's drivers are just as stable and bug-free as Nvidia's. I know this for a fact because i occasionaly program in OpenGL myself. ATI also has much better hardware at the moment, which is why i use one of their cards now.

It's also a well known fact ATI follows the OpenGL standards more closely. So things that work on Nvidia do not necessarily work on ATI because of a different approach to the standard.

Linden Labs pointing fingers at ATI because they have had crappy drivers in the past doesn't really help me. I'd rather have they took care of the bugs...

Max, that's just the thing. Look at it in this analogy.

Pretend Linden Lab is a tortoise and ATi is a hare. At the finish line is the fix to all our problems. With the bug currently on our hands, ATi as the hare can easily run to the finish line way before Linden Lab and fix what our silly little problem is. However, Linden Lab has to try a million things to actually get this bug fixed, thus they are getting to that finish line as slow as the tortoise that they are.

Our main problem here is that ATi is being just like the hare in the fabled tale, they keep doing somthing else instead of fixing a simple little problem that, to Linden Lab, is quite difficult to fix.

Does this help you understand the true predicament at hand?

PS: Don't force me to use an analogy that actually uses coding please! Because seriously, I could.

I really don't understand what you mean Dave

Why would ATI fix a bug in sl?

The bug isn't in SL, it's in the ATi drivers. Here's an example that I hope makes more sense...

ATi says "Here is how we code graphics with our drivers. You can create your graphics with all these functions, which we will name function 1 through 100,000. Hope you can make Second Life look good!"

Linden Lab says "Why thank you. We have decided to use function number 32,530."

ATi updates their drivers and says "We changed some code in function number 32,530 which breaks Second Life, sorry!"

Linden Lab is still looking for a function that makes Second Life look normal again and not crash, whereas ATi could simply fix function 32,530 and not force Linden Lab into trying to find a different function.

Sorry dude, but if this doesn't make sense, then please just don't complain, it hurts me

Well, my point was that i doubt the bug is entirely ATI's fault.

The bug i am talking about is that starting SL with fsaa on results in a black screen. I can hear the sound, but nothing is displayed. When i turn fsaa off SL works fine.

As other OpenGL games work fine with this setting on i suspect something is wrong in SL.

And BTW, OpenGL does not have 100,000 functions.

The point is that SL has always worked fine on NVidia cards, AND it worked fine on ATI cards running the Catalyst drivers up to and including version 3.1.

Then 3.2 comes out and SL goes nuts.

Is this SL's fault? I don't think so. Linden Lab doesn't write the Catalyst drivers. It seems far more likely that ATI broke something in Catalyst at the 3.2 release and has not fixed it yet, either because they don't think SL is important enough or because they made an "architectural decision" that would make fixing it impossible.

In all fairness, Linden Lab has not ignored ATI users. They are always implementing some kind of work-around for buggy ATI behavior. Lots of gamers are of the opinion that ATI's cards are faster, but NVidia's cards are more stable. The worst problem I ever had with my GeForce 2 was the "avatar swiss cheese" problem a couple months ago, which was fixed within one or two point releases. Certainly not a show-stopper.

Yesterday I downgraded from a very expensive ATI Radeon 9700 Pro to an nVidia FX 5200. Now my framerate is about 2fps, but at least I don't crash anymore. SL is very stable.

As soon as LL reports that there are no more problems with ATI, I'll reinstall my old card. Until then, I'll grumble openly about it like a disgruntled old man.

What was your F rate on the ATI. I have the 5200
because that was all I could afford at the time. But
I look around to see what is better.

--
Linden Lab and NVIDIA announce Strategic Alliance
Also at E3, Linden Lab announced a strategic marketing and development agreement with NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions.
--

When you have such a close "relationship" like this I become very suspicious of problems with one vendors card over another, especially when the problems are with the vendory they aren't buddy buddy with.

I don't have the kind of problems with other games which use OpenGL that I do with SL and yes, they use many if not all of the features that SL is using. I think perhaps LL needs to go out and BUY some ATI cards to test with and pull out some of those nVidia cards that they got handed.

Do you seriously think that LL wants people with ATi cards to be completely unable to play SL and loose them money?

Sign #1 of paranoia...

It would not be in the best interest of Linden Labs to shut out ATI users. LL is a small company which seems to have only one product. They aren't big enough to ignore potential customers, like a certain ELECTRONIC ARTiStic software company.

The fortunes of these companies come and go. I can remember when ATI graphics cards were just about the only thing on the shelves at Comp USA. But then they had some blunders. One of the blunders that affected me in fact was bad video drivers for Windows NT. The same card that would work fine in Windows 98 would cause my hard drive to get reformatted (for all practical purposes) if I booted NT. This was a pretty well known problem among ATI USERS of that time, although I don't think the company ever officially accepted blame for it. Issuing new drivers every few weeks while claiming that there are no serious bugs just doesn't stand the sensibility test.

ATI did drop out of the scene for high end video cards for a while though and came close to going out of business. They rescued themselves by focusing on the niche market for laptops, where people (at the time) picked a laptop based on the reputation of the laptop vendor (eg: Compaq) without much consideration to the specific components.

Not much more than a year ago it was commonly accepted that the nVidia was THE standard for mainstream 3D cards, with Matrox still being used at the very high end and ATI dominating laptops. Things have changed though, and we are back into a time of healthy competition. Unfortunately this means it will be harder for applications to optimize for particular hardware (as LL did for nVidia) and it will be harder for users to know who to blame when something goes wrong.

Personally I'm still a bit mistrustful of ATI. Having a video card that was 5% faster than everyone else's wasn't worth having to recover all my data.