Firestorm users: don’t miss my review of the 4.6.9 release.

Update, March 21st: AMD have release a new set of Catalyst™ drivers, version 15.3 beta, which include a potential fix for the rigged mesh issues – see my notes here.

Update, February 28th: Singularity have issued a supplemental update to address mesh rendering issues.

Update, December 13th: Yoho Waco offers a work-around for this problem – see his comment following his article. As an Nvidia user, I cannot test the workaround myself, but feedback indicates it works. I’ve also added Yoho’s workaround with additional information as an article in its own right.

Update: I have been informed (see the comment following this piece from JC de Bes, that this issue also extends to the most recent Omega drivers release.

Whirly Fizzle dropped me a line concerning the latest AMD Catalyst™ drivers update, 14.12, which is apparently being pushed out by AMD via automatic update.

As those on systems using AMD graphics cards are likely to be aware, there have been ongoing issues with the Catalyst drivers which have impacted Second Life, notably with regards to rigged meshes which, since the deployment of the 14.9.2 drivers by AMD, cause rigged mesh to be invisible unless hardware skinning is disabled (see BUG-7653).

The 14.12 Catalyst™ drivers currently being deployed by AMD do not address this issue; worse, as it is being pushed via automatic update from AMD, it may see an increase in issues being experienced for anyone using an AMD GPU, regardless of the viewer they are using, and even if they have recently rolled back to an earlier version of the driver.

The two ways of dealing with the problem / avoiding it, are to:

Either turn off hardware skinning off in the viewer (Preferences > Graphics > uncheck Hardware skinning), which is hardly ideal, or

Roll back to pre-14.9.2 Catalyst drivers via the AMD download site. Those affected should consider using (at the latest in terms of release numbers) version 14.9.1 – but be aware this driver has issues of its own (see BUG-7947 and BUG-7627). Therefore, the 14.4 drivers might be a better option.

Uninstalling the current AMD video drivers may be warranted prior to installing older drivers, and there is a request within the JIRA report linked-to above that those affected by the issue also raise a bug report directly with AMD to help bring this matter more to their attention.