Serious Texture Problems with 57876

Short version: The whole world is gray... and never completely rezzes.

Long version: Texture download issues seen across numerous sims where even after close to one hour wandering through an area (such as a large store), no more than about 80% is fully rezzed with full resolution textures. The extreme delay to get enough detail to navigate makes the main grid almost unusable with FL 57876. Monitoring bandwidth shows very little difference between the old viewer and FL (50kbps typical and around 400kbps peak on a 1.5Mbps line). The big difference is seen in the texture console with numerous listings for 1x1 textures and too many very small textures 4x4 and 8x8. Also, even though I have increased the cache size, FL does not seem to really cache anything useful. I can wander around within a single sim and textures that were at least partially (less than full resolution) rezzed a few minutes earlier have reverted to gray. This is not an issue with lag on a sim. I have the same behavior on sims with relatively few objects and textures as on very large crowded sims with frequent time dilation problems. Note my cache has been moved to an alternate location in order to allocate more space.

My system (I know it's an antique): AMD AthlonXP 2100+, 512MB ram, ATI Radeon 9700pro

I am happy to run tests and provide any further information in order to help fix this problem before the FL viewer becomes the default viewer.

It's the same for me. It reminds me of when I joined back in October, it was the same way, then they released some improvements to speed texture loading. Now it seems to have reverted back. I have to click on every item to get it to rez with the First Look viewer.

Windows XP SP2 MCE AMD64-4000 2gig ram ATI X850 Platinum

Interesting, because I have absolutley no texture load problems with First Look. I've found framerates have gone up by around 50% (depending on # of avs in the sim, lag, etc...), and most textures load before I have a chance to mouseover them, like I had to with the main viewer. First Look has been my main viewer since it was released, and things get better and better for me every release </me knocks on wood>.

My system (close to yours, but I gotcha beat in the "Really shouldn't be running SL on it at *all*" category ):

eMachine Pentium 4 2.5mHz 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9250

I have had to go back to the regular viewer since I couldn't navigate. Store signs wouldn't rez quickly enough for me to have any idea where I was going. The standard viewer still works well enough until I try the next FL revision.

With FL 57876 my frame rates were higher (also up to 50%), but I have to wonder if the improvement was due to the fact that I don't have all the textures that I am supposed to be rendering.

I have similar problems with the latest build. I see plain black or white textures, mostly. My face has no detail at all. Most textures are just a blur. My clothes have something like clothing shape, but they are monochromatic with no detail at all.

Athlon 4800+; 4G RAM; XTX 1900X 512M.

I have the same problem, and also random textures render with red/blue/green noise on them.

I hate this viewer. It is so slow.

XP SP2, dual Athlon 64 3800+, 1GB RAM, 256MB ATI Radeon X1300Pro.

I have a nice hint for people with Symantec Antivirus. The autoprotect-option is causing tremendous slowdown on the Second Life cache read/write.

Open Symantec and choose Configure/File System Auto-Protect.
Check Exclude selected files and folders.
Click Exclusions-button.
Click Files/Folders-button
Browse down to C:\Documents And Settings\YourName\Application Data\SecondLife\Cache\
Check the Cache-directory only.
Click Ok a couple of times, then close the window.

Voila, lot faster!

Please do this on your own risk. If any.

You can also right-click on the Symantec shield-icon in your right corner to temporarily turn of autoprotect, just to see if it makes any difference. Please note that the autoprotect turns itself on after a while, don't ask me why, it's Symantec!

I'm having all the same texture problems with the latest build. I see only the most basic clothing and skin textures; people's faces all have creepy, hollowed-out black eyes. I'm using Athlon 4800+, 4G RAM, ATI XTX 1900 X 512Mb.

Woopsy: That did the trick!!!

Does anyone know why the standard view was immune to this and first look is so adversely affected?

Glad to help.

I'm also curious why it didn't affect us earlier. Original client never caused any noticable conflicts with Symantec.

I don't use Symantec; I use AVG Free Edition. Does anyone know if this virus-checker could be causing a similar problem, and if so how I might address it? Because I still can't load clothing or skin textures at all with the First Look client.

I used to use AVG, and think it really sucks. I prefer the free norton that comes with google package. It isn't the best, but i was sick of mcaffee always wanting me to buy a new copy every year and i used to resort to downloading them as torrents. However the norton i use now from google, is pretty good. i never have problems with it that i can see.

Now to talk about texture problems, Both of my computers are experiencing a texture problem in SL using the FL client. Once in a while a texture will show up completely wrong. I was editing my appearance and my skin turned into blue checked designs. It's like the pipeline for the textures screwed up. A few days ago a linden tree had the same problem. it looked like some acid tripping Hippy flew by and painted it "woah thats one groovin tree man...". I was running both PCs with SL and noticed it first on my older PC my skin had changed. I decided to use my other PC with another account to see myself change clothes so i started switching through my clothes, and all of a sudden both clients ended up the blue checked pattern.

Well, updating my ATI video drivers to the latest (Jan 2007) version fixed most of my issues! Doh. For once, the stock advice to update one's drivers turned out to be the right advice. Now I can see clothing and skin textures. Some textures are still slow to load, and I tried on one T-shirt that never seemed to rez, but for the most part my major issue is now fixed. Yay!

Performance is more sluggish for me under this client, but that's probably because I cranked up many graphics settings in an effort to force textures to load.

My system: Athlon 4800+, ATI X1900XTX 512Mb, 4G RAM.

Check out the Blog comments under the new FL client entry. Seems that Norton Antivirus, and possibly other AV programs, may be the cause for slow loading textures. Exclude the cache directory from the realtime scan and texture rezzing may improve.

I find the Norton interface really confusing due to the myriad of options for settings. Nothing I've tried seems to offer the option to select a file folder, instead I keep getting "Open" options that just take me deeper and deeper into the folder structure.

Can anyone provide step-by-step click-this-tab instructions for Norton the way the message above describes the procedure for Symantec?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

There are several threads about this issue (and I've posted about it before), but this seems to be the most recent, so I'll post here.

I was able to resolve this issue by pulling two of my memory chips (reducing the system memory from 4Gb to 2Gb). I know not everyone who's posted about this has over 2Gb, but a good percentage of the posts I've read do. As soon as I pulled the memory and logged into SL, all textures loaded right away, crystal clear without having to right-click on textures.

I didn't have anti-virus software installed. Here's what my specs were before reducing the memory.
Intel Pent D 3.2GHz / 4Gb RAM / Windows Vista Ult x64 / 2x EVGA (nVidia) 7900GTX vid cards

Hopefully LL will take note of this bug. I know it doesn't affect too many users now, but that will change as people upgrade.

I should mention that I was experiencing this problem in both the first look and the regular clients. This has resolved the issue in both.