Overcoming Second Life Start-Up Crashes

del.icio.us Tags: AGP,Anti-Aliasing,Anisotropic Filtering,ATI Radeon HD2600XT,Catalyst Control Centre,Catalyst AI,Google,IT Solutions,OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects,Second Life

 

I thought I would write a blog on how to get Second Life to run on an ATI Radeon HD2600XT video card.

My card is the AGP series of the card as my computer is an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with 2 gigabytes of Corsair Value Select memory and a 250 gigabyte Western Digital Caviar hard drive.

I also have Windows XP Professional dual booted with Windows Vista Home Premium with Second Life installed on the Windows XP partition as you will see in the Second Life screenshots.

What I am about to show you through screenshots may apply to the PCI Express version of the card as well.

I tried a Google search for a solution to my problem first but only got more questions and very little in answers to a possible solution so I decided to delve into the 3D settings in the Catalyst Control Centre, below is the outcome of what helped me run Second Life.

The first step is to go to the Catalyst Control Centre and select the 3D Settings tab as Screenshot 1 shows below, this way you will be able to get to the Second Life login if you don’t do this initial step Second Life will load for a second and stay resident in memory but nothing will be on the screen.

Screenshot 1: 3D Settings in the Catalyst Control Centre

The second step is to go to the Catalyst AI tab in 3D settings and tick on “Disable Catalyst AI” as shown in Screenshot 2, by doing this it will allow Second Life to start without crashing.

Screenshot 2: Disabling the Catalyst AI in the Catalyst Control Centre

The other thing to remember is to allow Second Life to control anti-aliasing as well as de-select “Enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing”. I also found that if you allow Second Life to “Control Anisotropic Filtering” Second Life will start without crashing.

This now brings us to the Second Life side of getting Second Life to start without crashes.

When you get to the Second Life login screen you need to select the Edit menu and then Preferences.

You then need to select the Graphics tab as shown in Screenshot 3.

  Screenshot 3: Graphics tab in the Second Life Preferences Menu

From here you need to select Hardware Options on the Graphics tab as shown in Screenshot 4 and de-select “Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects”, I was also told that OpenGL VBO can cause objects not to display properly in the Second Life Viewer and also cause the viewer to crash.

  Screenshot 4: Disabling “Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects”

So there you have it my solution to getting Second Life to run on an ATI video card, took awhile to work out but it’s cool.

Enjoy

~ by techcorpit on February 14, 2009.