Bad Graphics On Second Life For Verison 1.7.2

Ok now this is the first time I have ever written o a forum so bear with me please.
I haven't been on SL as long as some of you out there, but I felt this should be shown.
Now understand I've only had problems with LAG since 1.6.8, like everyone else. Ok thats something I can work around. Now since the update to 1.7.2 I'm now suddenly having graphics problems. Texture breaking so bad that it locks up my card and I have to hard reboot, and as must windows owners know thats a bad thing to do to a windows machine.

Now I've updated all drivers in my machine, from motherboard to graphics card, and I've reinstalled SL 4 times. This is saddening.

My specs are as follows

AMD Athlon XP 2100+
768megs of DDR ram 233
ATI Radeon 9600 128meg

I know this isn't a fast machine but it plays SL really good, or did until they put this update out.

If anyone else is having this problem please post it here.

Yes Lightening, the texture load thing is EXTREMELY frustrating, being that this is a VERY visual game, i am somewhat shocked that they are hmmm shall i say "fluffing" over this bug. I can only imagine that shop keepers must be in arms by now, as the vendors are so slow to load, i havent been shopping in over a week, which is an all time record for me here. If i ran SL this would be a number ONE priorty to be fixed and quick, as the economy here is highly based on sales (and shopping!) What was one of the funnest parts of SL is now just a drag...and i almost dread now having to go and look for anything. Vendors may have to go to other forms of sales, than the regular wall vendor, or that may be a ploy of the evil empire to get us to use more prims, need more prims, buy more land, pay more land fees...hmmmm

I'm sure you've checked already, but do you have the latest ATI Catalyst driver? I think the latest version is 5.10.

Fox

When I told them about my texture loading problems they told me 32 video wasn't good enough. It was good enough before the update it should be good enough now. Soooooo pissed off. Yes, they are fluffing. And I'm tired of it.

I have a similar machine, but none of those problems.

Athlon 2400+
1.2 GB DDR2700
Radeon 9600 128MB

I would suggest making sure that you have the latest catalyst drivers.

edit: 32 MB video ram? Yikes... is that computer like 5 years old? And you expect it to run software like this? I'm shocked it's ever ran for you, let alone version 1.6... Even worse, if you are using a laptop with only 32 MB video ram, there's just no way... I'm not making fun of your system, but I'd hardly say that not supporting 32 MB ram is 'fluffing' anything. You are lucky it ran at all.

Yea I have the 5.10 drivers for my 9600.
this is a in game pic I took while it was going on.
Now I talked with a linden in the mist of this happening,
and they said and I quote "I've seen this before, when a
card is not getting enough power."
My responce is "This card is to old to need an external
power plugged into it. It's and AGP card." Anyway I
digress.

Lightnings

They were probably referring to your actual pc power supply not one needed for actually connecting to the graphics card, and although that card may not need an external supply other some agp cards do, as well as power supplied through the motherboard. So perhaps check your main pc power supply

I didn't have it then, and I still don't have it. My client's latency between the server is very small (Perhaps your ISP is to blame?).



Technically... Shouldn't cause really any problems windows nt+ systems couldn't handle, it might be a issue if the system is still writing to the harddrive however when you do a "hard reset".


Far more powerful than my six year old system that I use for playing SL =)

Are you using windows XP 64 bit edition or the general 32bit editions?

Have you tried using the omegadrivers for your card?

I've noticed in some instances they've solved issues such as this with some people.


Going to post anyway =)

As for the power issues mentioned, it seems a little odd that you would suddenly have power issues when before you didn't have them for playing SL.

Looking at the screenshot, I can tell you a few things.

I haven't had that problem with SL, but I HAVE had that problem with one other game - Half-Life 2. So have many other people, but not since the second or third patch.

It only affects very specific videocards, including the Radeon 9600. It has to do with the pixel shader pipelines and possibly faulty video memory. Does the game start out looking that bad, or does it start out fine, and then suddenly change to looking like that after a bit? If so, does it immediately correct itself if you close SL and log back in?

I have a 500 watt power supply, so if you are having a similar problem to what I'm describing, it probably doesn't have to do with a low-power power supply. Most likely, it's a problem with the video card that only manifests in very, very specific circumstances. This is why you may not have had that problem with any of the other games you've played.

Also, try changing your texture cache size in SL, and see if that changes anything. If there's a command to manually flush the textures from the cache and reload them, and it temporarily fixes the problem, you'll be a step closer to diagnosing the problem.