In the last 10 minutes or so of the Third Party Developers’ Meeting the problem with AMD video cards problems came up.
It seems especially the R series of video cards (RX480 etc.) have a problem with OpenGL. See: BUG-20057 – Visual Artifacts with ALM enabled on some AMD graphics cards.
AMD Screen Artifact – No Fix
This bug is dependent on screen size. So, you may be able to escape it by changing your viewer window size or screen resolution.
There is a thread in the AMD forum about the problem. It is way techy. See: OpenGL display artifact on W7100.
The apparent consensus among the dev’s is AMD is NOT listening to their requests for help nor looking into the problem. This is not simply a Second Life issue. The forum thread is a programmer showing how to reproduce the problem in a pure test case, showing it is a problem in the AMD system.
The current recommendation among dev’s is to abandon AMD and use Nvidia. I suppose FS Support is or will be talking that line too.
This problem has been around for SL and other OpenGL based games since June 2015. That it has been complained about for over a year, suggests it is not going to get fixed any time soon.
Is AMD abandoning OpenGL and moving on to Vulkan? Possibly. The Lab is not looking at moving SL to Vulkan. So… And SL is not the only one staying with or moving to OpenGL. I expect OpenGL to be around for awhile.
If it is true AMD is not supporting OpenGL then we can’t recommend AMD video cards for SL.
No shit. That’s exactly the issue I’m having with my PC now. it’s even saying my graphics cards are not being found while I’m playing SL. But this didnt happened until I upgraded to the new Firestorm version. .. contacted tech support for my PC brand and they just rolled back the driver…problema was fixed but then it says no graphics card found…so they made me do a full resto on my PC. And this PC it’s only 3 months old. This means no matter what it won’t work…..time to buy a PC WITH Nvidia graphics!!!!!!!
If it is a PC Desktop, just buy a new video card. The store will likely put it in for free.
Thanks so much I will give it a try 😊
OpenGL (and Linux) support by ATI (and now ATI/AMD) has always been abyssal… At best, you can expect your brand new card to be “supported” (and very badly so) for about two years. Then you are all alone. Even so, hardware bugs are rarely, if ever addressed by ATI (you’ll still find traces of a hardware mouse pointer crash bug with Radeon 9600/9700 cards in the Linux SL viewer wrapper script, in the form of a work around I submitted back in 2007 to LL, when ATI refused to solve that crash bug in their drivers, even after I pointed them to the fixed code in Open Source drivers).
Since then, I’ve banned ATI from all my systems and I’m exclusively buying NVIDIA cards (mind you, my old 7600GT card, which was contemporary of the ATI 9700 card is still supported by NVIDIA !).
Thanks for saying.