A number of people updating to SL Viewer 3.2.8 are getting pink prims. See the image below.

Image by Blaise Glendevon

There are two fixes. Neither are that great, but they will get you by until the Lab brings out a fix. The fix is thanks to the Firestorm/Phoenix Team, as far as I can tell. See: FIRE-4945 – Pink/Fushia textures when basic shaders enabled on ATI 3000-4000-5000 series cards.

Whirley Fizzle in the JIRA writes:

• Paste in all your system information from Help -> About Firestorm so we can see your graphics card & driver version

• Update to the 12.1 Catalyst driver from http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonmob_win7-64.aspx?type=2.4.2&product=2.4.2.3.31&lang=us&rev=&ostype=Windows%207%20-%2064-Bit%20Edition
  or run the AMD driver autodetect tool to update: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/auto_detect.aspx
  Whether this does or doesnt fix the issue, please repaste your system information once updated & let us know if it worked.

• *Fast “Fix”:
• Bring up the Advanced top menu with CTRL+ALT+D
  Then Advanced -> Debug settings -> RenderMaxTextureIndex -> Set this to zero
  This should fix the pink textures but may also cause a drop in your FPS (Frames per second)
• Disabling Basic Shaders (Avatar -> Preferences -> Graphics -> General -> Advanced -> Basic shaders) will also stop the pink, but things will not look as pretty.

• Open Stats window with CTRL+SHIFT+1
  Look at your FPS at the top of that window. Do you see a drop when you toggle RenderMaxTextureIndex betwen its default value (16) and zero?

• LL are looking for info on this bug. If you can reproduce the pink textures on the Second Life Development Viewer, download at the bottom of this page http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers
• …. then please follow instructions on SH-2908 here https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2908?focusedCommentId=309904&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-309904

You can find instructions on how to find your SL logs for viewer 3 here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Debug_Help

Info from Runitai Linden: RenderMaxTextureIndex controls how many textures can be combined into a single batch, so setting it to 0 will effectively give you 50% more draw calls. On systems where draw call overhead is the bottleneck, this can result in a huge performance penalty.

Summing Up

I’ve seen people complaining about the problem in the SL Forum and SL Answers. Most are new to SL and don’t know to post the contents of the viewer’s Help->About… when asking for help. So, its not possible for me to know whether this is an ATI/AMD only problem or not. But, it appears it is.

The Lab is working on a fix.

Peeps are discussing the problem on SL Universe: V3 Bug – Help, Please!

There is no truth to the rumor that this is the first phase of an attempt by Torley Linden to take over the world… er… Second Life.