NVIDIA Doesn't Like My Latest Version of Second Life

I was just about to visit some cool content in Second Life, but 10 seconds after launching the viewer on my AlienWare M11x, the screen went entirely black, and then I crashed to Windows and got this error:

This has been happening to me for at least the last month, anyone have any ideas?

Meantime, I'll back to playing Dishonored, which runs on my AlienWare just fine.

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Comments

[Metacam Oh]

Don't worry hamlet I have two powerful AMD graphic cards on two diff machines and SL often overloads the graphic card and crashes SL, and both computers are high end powerful should handle anything.

[Masami Kuramoto]

The title is wrong. It should read:

Second Life doesn't like my ancient NVIDIA driver

Version 197.72 was released in June 2010. The current version is 306.97, released two weeks ago.

But then again, we've talked about this before, haven't we? You can't compare Second Life to some DirectX 9 game. It's an entirely different beast.

[Ezra]

Go to http://www.geforce.com/drivers and update your video card drivers. Version 197.72 is from 2010.

[Harper Beresford]

I upgraded my 9800 to a 550 after much trouble--EVGA support hosed some information for me. Turns out my BIOS needed upgrading, which was easy to do. I WAS getting that message periodically but it has entirely stopped now. Perhaps a new card is in order....?

[shockwave yareach]

@Harper - it's a laptop.

You know, perhaps there need to have two versions of viewer - one using openGL and the other using DirectX. As much as I wanted the open source version to succeed, being multiplatform and all, it hasn't been kept up to date (and in sync with modern cards/drivers) nearly as much as DirectX has.

Or maybe someone can take the viewer code and turn it into one on their own.

[Hamlet Au]

Thanks all, I had a feeling it might be an outdated driver. I continue to be amazed the viewer doesn't automatically give me an update when I install the latest version. Maybe it will when it's finally on Steam.

[Nalates Urriah]

nVidia Drivers 306.97 Released

http://blog.nalates.net/2012/10/15/nvidia-drivers-306-97-released/

It is working very well with my GTX560Ti

[Masami Kuramoto]

Hamlet wrote:

I continue to be amazed the viewer doesn't automatically give me an update when I install the latest version.

I continue to be amazed that your operating system doesn't give you the update automatically. Because, you know, there are some that do.

But fret not, soon SL will be on Steam, and I hear that Gabe Newell loves Linux. :)

[Gattz Gilman]

Windows Updates will only show driver updates as optional. So unless you go in there yourself and select them to install, it won't.

But I have been getting that same error as well for the past few months using Firestorm and up to date drivers. So it might be a bug in the rendering that is causing the graphics driver to crash.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Yeah I have two older PC laptops (2007 and 2009) - driver updates never get a notice. Often even if you click the little button on the driver's properties to update it you'll get a -not found- notice while sitting there staring at the very driver update in another window...

/facepalm.

Not to say things are perfect in Mac land. They have their own sudden moments (where mah google maps @) after all. :)

[Gary J. Bivin]

I've been fighting this problem for months. It seems to be pretty common (not just SL). I've tried different versions of the video drivers, both with an Nvidia and a Radeon graphics card, including the latest. Driver updates don't seem to do anything to fix it.

[David]

Version 197.72 is from 2010. I'm quite surprised SL has managed to run this long on your computer with such an outdated driver.

Games including SL don't automatically update the video drivers when you try to run them. I'm more surprised Windows Update didn't try to tell you to update the video drivers though.

[DBDigital Epsilon]

Well first see if there is a updated driver for your laptop. I know someone that had this issue and that seems to have fixed the problem. However this was a desktop and you may not be able to use the latest NVIDIA drivers and need to contact Alienware to see if they can or plan to update the drivers available.

But another thing you can try: NVIDIA drivers often crash if you let external programs handle color correction in Windows 7. Unfortunately, nVidia defaults to that mode.

Set both color-correction options (3D and video) to use NVIDIA's settings. It is possible it's the usual 64-vs-32 bit issues. You cannot use 32-bit plugins with 64-bit software, or vice versa. Either way this might help.

[Dave Bell]

I also had that error message a couple of nVidia driver versions ago. Turn down the graphics details slightly, it can mean that the card is taking too long to render a frame.

OpenGL keeps getting improved, and about a year ago Linden Labs got caught out with some very old graphics code in the viewer.

I've never trusted Windows to handle graphics driver updates for me. Ten years ago, with Windows XP, the latest drivers via MS only gave you OpenGL v1.0, when OpenGL v2.0 was what was often needed.

[Archangel Mortenwold]

Looks like a problem with your graphics card. AMD is notorious for doing this with any graphics-intensive program even on lower settings.

[shockwave yareach]

You can also try reseating your video card and your ram sticks (as long as you are in there.) I typically have to reseat everything once a year to break through whatever oxides grow on the metal connectors. The days of getting good 15u gold plating on your connectors are over -- today it's all cheap Chinese brass when oxidizes and loses conductivity.

[jjccc]

i bet you were crashed and it has nothing to do with graphic card http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://secondlifegriefers.blogspot.com/">http://secondlifegriefers.blogspot.com/">http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://secondlifegriefers.blogspot.com/

[Tateru Nino]

That's a common one. There's a timeout set in the operating system, and it is aggressively short - which kills things a little too soon. If you have a laptop, you'll have a lot more trouble with this. Basically, the viewer is still setting graphics modes and options and the graphics hardware/drivers are busy with that, but Windows is sulking because the graphics hardware isn't talking to it RIGHT NOW(!)

I sometimes suspect that the timeout is set so that it particularly impacts OpenGL apps.