Update, April 27th: AMD have now updated their beta drivers to version 15.4.



AMD have release a new set of Catalyst™ drivers for windows which, according the release notes, includes a fix intended to resolve the rigged mesh issues which, since the deployment of the 14.9.2 drivers by the company, have caused rigged mesh to be invisible unless hardware skinning is disabled (see BUG-7653 and my report here).

In the release notes accompanying the new drivers, AMD note the following under Resolved Issues:

[413076] Second Life : Rigged mesh objects are not rendered correctly when hardware skinning is enabled in the in game setting

The update was spotted by SL user Liffento Eldritch, who posted the news on the Firestorm Preview Group, prompting Miro Collas of the Firestorm team to poke a few people, and Whirly Fizzle to drop me a line on the update.

As regular readers of these pages know, I’ve followed the situation with the AMD drivers, and have posted on the matter a few times. In turn, as a result of these posts, Yoho Waco wrote-up a workaround for the problem, which appeared in a comment on a blog post here, and which I later reproduced as an article in its own right.

The workaround involves using .DLL files from either the 14.9.1 or 14.2 Catalyst™ drivers, and placing them in the viewer’s installation folder.

If you are one of those who have employed this workaround yourself, please not that you must remove the relevant .DLLs files from your viewer’s installation folder, or the viewer will revert to using them, rather than the drivers for the newer .DLLs.

I’m an Nvidia user, and so cannot test things for myself, so should you give the new beta driver a go, please do drop a note in the comments on whether or not the fix works for you.