Shadows and Radeon HD 7400 M

[Timo Gufler]

My friend likes SL photography and decided to buy a new computer, to be able to shoot pictures more easily with powerful hardware. However, after getting HP Pavilion dv6 laptop with Radeon HD 7400M graphics card, she was disappointed, because the shadows didn't work at all, despite of SL graphics settings (I checked them out and all lighting and shadow settings should be fine). She updated the ATI graphics drivers in Windows 7, but that didn't help either. Does anyone have any ideas, what could solve this problem? 

[Nalates Urriah]

Get GPU-Z (free program) and make sure the video card is being used. Laptops tend to turn the video card off to save power. Often one has to create a special setup in the video card's control panel to get it running with SL.

ATI has not put as much effort into OpenGL as nVidia has. So, shadows are a bit of problem with Radeon cards. You are going to have to experiement with graphics settings to find out what works. Try turning varous Hardware features on and off via the Hardware button in Preferences->Graphics.

You may want to suggest the Development Viewer. It has the newest render code. It may work better.

Since you have updated the driver that should be ok. But, search this forum to see if you can find posts on the video card model and version number.

You may want to try some third party viewers. Niran's Viewer has lots of enhancements for photographers. The user interface is non-standard (see Nirans). Exodus is another good viewer. 

Firestorm is a very good general purpose power users viewer. They have lots of support people. Ask in their group and see what they have to say about the video card.

The render engine made by the Lab is changing right now. It SHOULD work better. When you hit a problem document it well and file a JIRA bug report.

[Timo Gufler]

Thanks for the response, Nalates! I will ask her to test different hardware features and viewers too. She has tested Firestorm and the official viewers at least so far.

[Timo Gufler]

Just for your information, that my friend ran several Windows updates and as a result, the problem vanished and she is able to use shadows. Hard to say, what really fixed the problem, but she is happy now.