Under Windows Vista, my graphics card reports as a GDI Generic. Why is that?

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Revision as of 21:28, 5 October 2009 by Yoz Linden (talk | contribs) (1 revision)
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This article is part of the Extended Second Life Knowledge Base that includes advanced and specialized information. This information was originally provided by Linden Lab, but is not actively maintained nor guaranteed to be accurate. Linden Lab does not certify nor assume any responsibility for this information.

See the official Second Life Knowledge Base for the most current information.

Second Life requires that the Windows drivers for the system's graphics card fully support the OpenGL graphics standard. Any graphics card whose installed driver does not support OpenGL detects as a "GDI Generic" instead. This message means that Second Life has detected no hardware with OpenGL support.

It's up to the graphics vendor (Nvidia or ATI) to provide drivers that support both OpenGL and your operating system. As of this writing, we have successfully run Second Life on Vista under several PCs equipped with Nvidia's Geforce graphics cards.

If you receive this message under Vista, are running graphics hardware that meets our Minimum System Requirements, and can't find a driver provided by your graphics vendor that provides OpenGL support, you'll be unable to run Second Life under Windows Vista on that computer.