Good news for nVidia card users and Viewer 3/Firestorm

[Spiral Silverstar]

There is a Beta version of the newest driver available at nVidia site, and It seems to work smoothly and well for me, using Viewer 3 as well as Phoenix Firestorm Beta-Mesh.  It is Version 285.27 beta.   I have a GEForce GTX 460 nVidia card, fyi.

Just download and install!

 

http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-64bit-285.27-beta-driver.html

[Wildcat Furse]

thx for the link Spiral .... notebook users can use this Beta version here *meows*

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-285.27-beta-driver-uk.html

[Peggy Paperdoll]

I'm glad nVidia didn't ignore the OpenGL issue for a year or more like ATI did...........I'll wait for the stable release though.  I hate beta testing for some huge corporation without even a thank you.

[Imagin Illyar]

I upgraded to an nVidia GTX 560ti just before V3 came out and all the server updates.  I had a few days of ultimate SL bliss with the SL V3 viewer and then it went sadly downhill as the server updates started. and I had to once again turn my graphics settings way down to prevent crashing.  Until I tried Phoenix Firestorm.  Now I can have my graphics at Ultimate and wander the grid with shadows on and have - get this - never crashed once with Firestorm.  With the SL V3 viewer I would crash at least 3 times a day.  I work in SL and this is a very big deal to me.

I will be sticking with Firestorm

[Dora Gustafson]

Maybe LL should hire the Firestorm team to fix their viewer

I feel more and more like I am LL's guinea pig:smileymad:

I use  GeForce GTX 460/PCI/SSE2 with the old old driver fix 260.99 WHQL for the bug CTS-657
And I still have viewer crashes in crowded rooms

[Imagin Illyar]

Crowds were what did it for me too, Dora.  Any place with more than 4 or 5 people I'd crash as soon as I took my first step.  I have 2Gigs of ram on my video card plus 8 gigs of regular ram and a quad core machine.  I knew it wasn't just me.

Firestorm has WAY more features, has my favorite Starlight skins built right in and yet it NEVER crashes.  To me that means there is something seriously wrong with the standard SL V3 viewer.

I am LOVING finally being able to wander the grid with shadows on

[Tristizia Demonista]

Firestorm Beta Mesh has the same probs as the official Viewer, it's an OpenGL Issue with Nvidia cards !

[Hitomi Tiponi]

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Imagin Illyar wrote:

Crowds were what did it for me too, Dora.  Any place with more than 4 or 5 people I'd crash as soon as I took my first step.  I have 2Gigs of ram on my video card plus 8 gigs of regular ram and a quad core machine.  I knew it wasn't just me.

Firestorm has WAY more features, has my favorite Starlight skins built right in and yet it NEVER crashes.  To me that means there is something seriously wrong with the standard SL V3 viewer.

I am LOVING finally being able to wander the grid with shadows on

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As Tristizia says Firestorm suffers the same big OpenGL problem that Viewer 3 does.  But there are also a few bugs in Viewer 3 that Firestorm have either fixed or chosen not to deploy.

[Imagin Illyar]

Well, if there are OpenGL bugs I surely don't see them spending my days terraforming and building.  I had problems with an old ATI card but not with my new nVidia.

[Marvolo Ferrentino]

I thought FIrestorm was like a be all end all to the problems.

While it isn't as frequent, it still happens.  And this driver update is hardly better than the previous one.  Guess I will just have to delete my cache before I log in, everytime!

[Imagin Illyar]

How odd that some people are perfectly fine with nVidia and Firestorm.  I have no issues whatsoever. 

[Hitomi Tiponi]

@Marvolo - Firestorm will never sort out all Viewer problems until LL have solved most of them because it is based on the LL core code - they are just trying to improve it in several areas.

@Imagin - Whether you are affected does seem to depend on the GPU you have, what graphic settings you have, which sims you are on and whether you saw a magpie that morning :smileyhappy:.  As you can imagine, with a problem that is that fickle it will also take some time to fully fix.

[Cheshyr Pontchartrain]

Quite odd. For me, Viewer 3 is hell on an nVidia 560 Ti under Windows 7 64-bit.  Firestorm and Phoenix run fine. But I cannot use shadows in any of them, without FPS dropping to 5-6, followed by a crash.

[Coby Foden]

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Cheshyr Pontchartrain wrote:

Quite odd. For me, Viewer 3 is hell on an nVidia 560 Ti under Windows 7 64-bit.  Firestorm and Phoenix run fine. But I cannot use shadows in any of them, without FPS dropping to 5-6, followed by a crash.

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Very strange. I have:

CPU: Intel® Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz

Memory: 8169 MB

OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1

Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 560 Ti/PCI/SSE2

Driver version: 266.44

Using either:

Second Life 3.2.2 (244666) Nov  8 2011 17:07:43 (Second Life Beta Viewer)

or

Firestorm 3.0.1 (22525) Sep  6 2011 13:04:42 (Mesh beta)

 

Both run just fine with good frame rates. I can use shadows in both of them, but then the frame rate drops considerably in both of them. Still usable with shadows on though.

[Dora Gustafson]

A good cure against low frame rates on a system like yours is to
clear cache AND restart the computer.

What confirms that is the fact that you run more viewers on your computer:smileyhappy: