Second Life residents who use AMD grphics cards are probably already aware of the ongoing issues with AMD’s Catalyst drivers. The most recent updates to these drivers conflict with the ability to see rigged mesh in Second Life. This problem is related to the 14.9.2 driver update deployed by AMD. The fastest way to fix this problem is to have hardware skinning disabled. There is an article on this bug in the JIRA that can be found here.

I am reposting pics from the Living in a Modem World blog that clearly show the problem on the left, and the fix on the right by disabling hardware skinning:

In her blog, Inara Pey has written an article about an additional work-around for Windows users with an AMD graphics card.

In her post, Inara outlines steps that Yoho Waco, a contributing writer to her blog, came up with in order to get around this problem. AMD sends out these driver updates to the graphics cards automatically, and so one of the solutions is to roll back to an earlier version of the drivers to enable users to see mesh again.

But for those who wish to use the latest Catalyst or Omega drivers for their cards, this workaround should fix the mesh rendering issue. Yoko uses uses Windows 7 64-bit, but Inara’s article indicates that the basic approach should work with all versions of windows, 64-bit and 32-bit.

Like Inara, I have a Nvidia graphics card, so I was not able to test these steps. But if you have an AMD graphics card and have been experiencing problems seeing mesh, I encourage you to review the article and follow the steps found there.

The complete article can be found by clicking here: AMD Catalyst™ drivers: additional Windows workaround.

This is a perfect example of how Second Life residents come together to create a solution to a problem that benefits all. There have been and will continue to be a lot of negative things about Second Life. But I love how this community pulls together to help one another.

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZoHa Islands Social Media