Upgraded my Intel HD graphics card 4000 driver /Textures glitch badly

[Athena Novaland]

Upgraded my Intel HD graphics card 4000 driver and the Textures glitch badly. The card is fine and get great FPS 40 to 60 normally. Now with the newest driver I get texture glitches when basic shader is turned on. Its a bug, as I tested it much more advance Graphics systems. Entropia Universe -- Highest setting and Knights of the Old Republic- Same (Both worked fine). Is there a fix or will there be a way to get around this without dumbing down the graphics on the viewer itself. Note: Shader being turned off solves the issue.

 

Edit: Atmosphere shader works fine nomatter what.

[Curious Hazelnut]

I just did the same update and have the same problem. Lots of graphcis glitches.

How the heck do you get 40 to 60 FPS? Even with almost nothing in draw range except the prim I'm standing on (way up in the sky) I can't get more than 18 FPS at the recommended settings and on minimal settings I still don't get 30 FPS.

 

[Athena Novaland]

I am basing this on a Region without majour scripts and lots of people. On a normal crowded sim..I get about 25 to 30. It helps much I have a large amount of Ram(Upgraded).

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

You could downgrade your graphics driver. A quick search resulted in this. Make sure you read very well before installing.

The HD4000 doesn't meet the minimum requirements for SL (going by the benchmarks), so even if you had no problems before, I don't think you can expect any fix or support from LL.

[Trifina]

Forgive me, but I'm confused. LL lists the Intel 945 as a 'minimum requirement'. How can a HD 4000 not be suitable?

 

(Granted, I'm struggling with a 947, and while it works, I can't really go anywhere without the client locking up due to ping times of several seconds. So "minimum requirement" is a slippery term.)

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

I was going by the lowest dedicated desktop card, the 6600.

The graphics chipset for the 945, the GMA950, although older than the HD4000, is not all that slow in comparison. A couple of numbers:

Clock speed 400 vs 650 MHz

Buswidth 256 vs 128 bit

Bandwidth 10.3 vs 21.3 GB/s

Pixelfillrate 1.6 vs 1.3 GPixels/s

Texturefillrate 1.6 vs 1.3 GTexels/s

That's about everything I can find.

I never said the HD4000 won't meet the minimum requirements btw, I said going by the benchmarks it doesn't. That might have been a bit confusing and since I took the 6600 as a reference maybe not even accurate.... People use the HD4000 for SL so that proves it works. Don't expect any real performance though.

 

The ping times are determined by your internet connection.

[leliel Mirihi]

Those are not very good numbers to use when comparing to GPUs from different families. The GMA950 is actually not even a 3d chip, it has no vertex processing capabilities and only limited texture processing, feature wise it's barely better then the nvidia tnt2 released way back in 1999. For a bit of a history lesson the GMA900/950 are the chips intel bribed microsoft to certify as aero capable when they were anything but, they are almost single handedly the reason aero got such a bad rep when vista was first released.

The HD4000 is a much, much, much faster chip, it performs about on par with the geforce 610m / radeon hd 6470m.

As for LL's minimum requirements, I'd recommend you take them with a very large grain of salt. The geforce 6600 is more than twice as fast as the "minimum" ati cards listed which are quiet a bit faster than the "minimum" intel chip listed. What LL lists has more to do with the number of people using said hardware then how fast it is (i.e. there's tones of people out there using old decrepit hardware and LL doesn't want to scare them away).

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

As I said, they were the only numbers I could find, well apart from the benchmarks, but those aren't exactly reliable either.

One card being faster than the other doesn't automatically mean it meets the same standards on every little detail. So you can't say if one card meets the minimum requirements, all cards that are "faster" will as well.

I didn't take the 6600 as a reference without a reason. Anyone who wants to dwell in a 3d environment should be willing to at least invest in some 3d capable hardware. That doesn't have to be top of the line of course, but an onboard like the HD4000 is on the low end and that I would call an understatement. Yes you'll be able to run a viewer, but that's it. You probably won't be able to run any other progams, visit busy sims without terrible lag or use some of the higher settings.

Anyway, the problem was texture glitches after a driver update:) I hope the OP fixed that by now.

[Rena Sakai]

I recently purchased a new laptop running the HD 4000 card. My last laptop had a dedicated graphics card that ran SL flawlessly, but it ran so hot I developed motherboard issues. The new laptop runs SL---but not without issues. I have a terrible case of the jaggies, so apparently anti-aliasing isn't functioning at all. I often get crashes if I"m in a crowded sim or try to teleport. However, the HD card WILL run SL... most of the time and with compromises. If you are a dedicated SL player, I would recommend a desktop unit that can run cooler with a fast card. I've not found an affordable, reasonably portable laptop that can run SL adequately. 

[Noel Loordes]

Did anyone have further experiences with this issue?

 

I have now tried all (64bit) driver versions available from the Intel webpage and from the notebooks software support page. With all of them, when enabling basic shaders, I would see random flickering of GUI elements. Partly it looks like rebuilding of the elements (text vanishing and reappearing at high frequency), partly color glitches can be observed.

While I couldn't get a screen-shot of the extreme cases (occur irregularily) I can provide some screenshots of the bug:

1. Some UI elements how they look most of the time and how they look while flickering.

2. The chat bar continously has a discolored scroll bar when Basic Shaders is enabled.

Similiar effect with minor elements in the preferences:

 

Sadly, keeping basic shaders disabled is only a more-or-less solution as basic shaders seem to be required for correct lighting of mesh; Without it I would see weird effects like inverted brightness (objects looking as if light comes from the opposite direction) or entirely missing lighting. 

Interestingly texture glitches (flickering colors of floor, prims vanishing and reappearing at high frequency) would only occur with the official viewer, but not with Firestorm, Singularity or Catznip Viewer. 

[Stae Young]

Hello newcomer to this discussion.  Has anyone fixed this?? 

Firestorm 4.5.1 (38838) Oct 28 2013 00:03:49 (Firestorm-Beta) with Havok support
Release Notes

CPU: Intel® Core i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.40GHz (2394.46 MHz)
Memory: 7968 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 8 64-bit  (Build 9200)
Graphics Card Vendor: Intel
Graphics Card: Intel® HD Graphics 4600

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 9.18.0010.3071
OpenGL Version: 4.0.0 - Build 9.18.10.3071

SAME ISSUE-- rainbow/Flicker  only resolved by basic shaders OFF which is a very poor solution.  ANYONE have any good news?

[leechacks]

Hi Which driver did you update to as mine just wont even install sl as the driver is out of date, i cant find the driver anywhere,not even firestorm viewer will install.

 

Cheers

Lee