[AMD Radeon] Crash on boot with latest AMD drivers

[Hanako Alchemi]

I'm having an issue on a system with an AMD Radeon HD7850 running on Windows 7 64-bit. 

With anything but the 13.4 official drivers and anything prior, which are 4 months out of date now, SL loads into the world, some parts of the world load, but my AV does not. Within about 5 seconds, my viewer crashes without warning. This happens on Niran's, Exodus, Catznip, and both the current and beta LL viewers. This has been happening for months with anything beyond the 13.4 AMD release.

Up til now, I've had no pressing reasons to update, but as of 13.8 beta 2, there are significant performance and latency improvements across a number of new games, and it's forced my hand to update my drivers, meaning now I can't run SL.

No other programs have this issue, and some quick googling points to updates to OpenGL in the latest AMD drivers having to do with it, with SL failing several OpenGL calls when crashing on the new drivers.

I have no idea how to see this issue addressed, as no other programs running their rendering off of OpenGL (such as Awesomenauts, which I play), have these crashes, and I feel that contacting SL support will push nothing along. I'm primarily concerned with finding a viewer that might run with the latest drivers and seeing if I can find others having the same issues. I don't expect this to be fixed, of course, as judging by Linden Lab's usual response time, I imagine this might be fixed in 2-3 years, assuming the drivers don't sort themselves out eventually.

My system specs are as follows:

Operating System
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU
AMD FX-6100
RAM
8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 799MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. GA-970A-D3 (Socket M2)
Graphics
2048MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series (Sapphire/PCPartner)
Audio
Creative X-Fi Audio Processor (WDM)

[Hanako Alchemi]

Firestorm seems to run on the 13.8beta2 drivers.

As of this post, all viewers mentioned in my previous post still crash on login.

[Theresa Tennyson]

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Hanako Alchemi wrote:

 

No other programs have this issue, and some quick googling points to updates to OpenGL in the latest AMD drivers having to do with it, with SL failing several OpenGL calls when crashing on the new drivers.

 

I have no idea how to see this issue addressed, as no other programs running their rendering off of OpenGL

(such as Awesomenauts, which I play),

have these crashes, and I feel that contacting SL support will push nothing along. I'm primarily concerned with finding a viewer that might run with the latest drivers and seeing if I can find others having the same issues. I don't expect this to be fixed, of course, as judging by Linden Lab's usual response time, I imagine this might be fixed in 2-3 years, assuming the drivers don't sort themselves out eventually.

---

Awesomenauts is a 2D application - can't be logically compared to SL.

What graphics mode are you running, regular mode or Lighting and Shadows/Advanced Lighting Model/Deferred Rendering? I've heard of people who crash with one viewer with the new AMD drivers and not other viewers. Have you tried changing graphics modes?

[Hanako Alchemi]

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

Awesomenauts is a 2D application - can't be logically compared to SL.

What graphics mode are you running, regular mode or Lighting and Shadows/Advanced Lighting Model/Deferred Rendering? I've heard of people who crash with one viewer with the new AMD drivers and not other viewers. Have you tried changing graphics modes?

---

Doesn't matter. Minimum, ultra, any settings at all crash.

 

All on, all off, incrementally turned on one at a time, nothing works. 

It's been this way for quite some time. As I said, 13.4 was stable, I believe the 13.5 beta might've been stable, up until its final revision, and everything since has crashed.

Also, as I just replied, Firestorm mysteriously works while nothing else does. That right there should make troubleshooting it pretty easy: What does Firestorm do with rendering that all these other viewers do not?

[VioletPrisioner]

I have Radeon 6850 and the same issue is happening to me  

[Vivienne Daguerre]

I have exactly the same problem. Here are my stats:

 

Second Life 3.6.3 (279564) Aug 6 2013 00:25:49 (Second Life Release)
Release Notes

CPU: Intel® Core i7 CPU Q 720 @ 1.60GHz (1595.98 MHz)
Memory: 6133 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 8 64-bit (Build 9200)
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0010.1234
OpenGL Version: 4.2.12438 Compatibility Profile Context 13.200.0.0

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8q zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.7.1
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.0
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.12
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Built with MSVC version 1600

Another friend with an ATI card, not sure exactly which one, is also having the same problem.

[Vivienne Daguerre]

"What does Firestorm do with rendering that all these other viewers do not?"

What a good question! This is the key question. There are two bits of the SL viewer code that I know Firestorm has not yet incorporated: Materials and the CHUI. 

The strange thing is, that before the SSA roll out, I was able to use the SL viewer to go in, look at the new CHUI (Chat User Interface) and see materials. Something about the combination of the three, SSA, CHUI, and Materials seems to be the problem, or perhaps there is some unknown bug fix rolled into the mix that is creating the problem.

[Vivienne Daguerre]

I filed a jira on this, but with the new system I don't think you can see it or comment on it. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-3733

I don't know if there would be any value in filing more jiras on this topic or not. It might be that filing individual jiras might emphasize the point that many have this problem. I don't know how else to make them aware of the problem or how wide spread it is. Perhaps they read these threads, but I would not count on that.

[Tonya Souther]

I get this crash on my Linux system as well, but not a development build of Firestorm with materials and CHUI. I filed a BUG JIRA against it, BUG-3582.

[KeikoYanai Yue]

same here, sim is rezing, im still invisible, and before avatar textures or myself are loading the viewer crashes.  rolled back to way older drivers and it works again.

 

Second Life 3.6.7 (281793) Sep 30 2013 10:17:59 (Second Life Release)
Release Notes

CPU: Intel® Core i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz (3209.68 MHz)
Memory: 22473 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0010.1230
OpenGL Version: 4.2.12422 Compatibility Profile Context 13.152.0.0

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8q zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.7.1
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.0
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.12
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded)
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
Built with MSVC version 1600

[Vinnie Myoo]

Is there no fix? I hate having to use Firestorm, i think the SL viewer looks way better. This is really bumming me out.

[Viktoria Dovgal]

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Vinnie Myoo wrote:

Is there no fix? I hate having to use Firestorm, i think the SL viewer looks way better. This is really bumming me out.

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There is a new test viewer you can try. It is working for me with Catalyst 13.9, I hope this fix will do the job for others too.

http://automated-builds-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/hg/repo/simon-ll-viewer-cat/rev/282303/arch/CYGWIN/installer/Second_Life_3-6-8-282303_Test_Setup.exe

Oh yeah: the red menu bar is normal, it's a reminder that you're on an experimental viewer.

[Vivienne Daguerre]

This test viewer works for me too! Yay! 

[SpencerCadence]

I am heartbroken. I bought a new computer last night in the hopes of using it for Second Life and my music. I have been out of SL for about a year now, but it feels like longer. I wanted to get back into the swing of things, start making animations again, sing in SL again. Unfortunately I have AMD drivers. I, too, amd having the load in issue where none of my skin or clothing loads, then a few seconds later, crash. I came so close to get shot down.

 

My system specs are:

[SpencerCadence]

And not even Firestorm works...