LL Does not support HD 4000/5000 Series ATI Cards???

I am on the verge of a major video card upgrade and have been considering an ATI 4890...

But everything I've read so far, and I've spent over a week researching and reading reviews/benchmarks, etc... Everything I've thus far tells me that anything ATI based is not going to work with Second Life.

It seems to me that Linden Labs does not even support the popular HD4000 and HD5000 series of ATI chips...

I know it is a matter of OpenGL; but it seems that ATI has been offering more support for that with its newer drivers.

So, is Linden Labs going to start supporting those ATI chip series?

Or am I better off going with an nVidia GTX 200 series card?

If Second Life is your most demanding application, a GTX 260 will do just fine.

It's not a matter of does LL support any graphics card. It's a matter of the graphics card support for the rendering engine that SL uses........which is OpenGL. ATI cards work quite well with SL if you turn off the VBO in your graphics settings in preferrences. ATI has been behind nVidia for quite a long time in the area of OpenGL but I do believe the gap is closing somewhat.

And, if you don't want to tweak your settings nVidia is probably more suited for you with use in SL.........but it's a good card. I would never base my opinion on a "best" anything according to a single program I might use. It's what you want overall that determines what's best. But that's up to you.

Overall...

I want a card that works best for some extreme gaming, I tend to play Crysis:Warhead and Far Cry 2 a lot and plan to get more games of similar quality in the near future.

But, I do tend to work in SL more then I play those games.

So it seems to be that an nVidia card is going to be the better choice here.

Since I'm not a gamer I can't vouche for it but I believe ATI has the edge in DirectX which is what most games are.

It's a trade off.

And for the record I use nVidia. Not to say anything against ATI except the one ATI card I had died one day and I got an nVidia and for some reason I've stuck with them. No particular bias at all.

Actually, a large number of games are optimized for Nvidia. It might be worthwhile to pick up a 260 or even a 9800 now, and save up for the 300 series in the first quarter of next year. Those will offer DX11, OpenCL/Direct Compute support, and a number of other new features.

and PhysX

I disagree that any game is optimised for any particular video card. That would be insane to limit yourself in such a way. They decide on the graphics rendering engine, be it DirectX, OpenGL, PhysiX, or any other method of rendering the video. Most choose DirectX since all Windows based computers have that.........and Windows is on the vast majority of computers built in the world (it used to be around 80% but they may be slipping a little to Mac......not a significant slippage yet). The video card manufacturers build and design their cards to run on the majority of games with attention paid to the second place platform (Mac). I believe both nVidia and ATI focus most of there efforts to making sure their drivers (software) toward DirectX..........and nVidia focuses a little effort on OpenGL than ATI. I believe ATI has seen the light and is not putting a little better support in their drivers for OpenGL lately.

PhysiX is brand new.......it's Windows based too so eventually it will probably surpass OpenGL in graphics rendering for both of the big dogs in video card manufacturing. Games don't optimize for cards...........it's the other way around (through their drivers for the rendering engines used by the game makers).

I've been having problems with SL with my HD4890. I just now got windows 7, and my old problem was fixed but something new has happened already. My own avatar is going phantom. I can't figure it out.

IMO go with nvidia.. I never had any problems with my old card. As good as this ATI runs my other games, SL still gives me problems.

It's not usually the game that is optimized (OK, I misspoke), but Nvidia drivers that are optimized for games. There's usually a long list of games supported when you read the release notes for Nvidia drivers. But that said, Nvidia has a track record of working closely with game studios to ensure performance, so there is a give and take between them. And PhysiX is not a graphics rendering engine...it is a physics engine (more like Havoc on the SL servers).

No kidding - heh. I brought it up because he was asking Nvidia or ATI and to me the addition of PhysX in new Nvidia cards is a plus. I wasn't meaning for SL, just in general (as he said he plays various games).

That was at Peggy's post. I have the Physix Screen saver set up on my laptop...it's amazing to watch.

Oops.

ATI HD4850 user here. Initially I had horrendous problems too, even with VBO turned off, the standard Second Life viewer would always crash, without fail, sometimes on loading, sometimes I'd be 5 minutes in then total crash.

I then switched to using the Snowglobe viewer. Perfect!, zero crashes. I still have VBO turned off but everything else is on, including anti alias and anisotropic filtering (which makes the biggest difference when looking at texture surfaces at sharper angles keeping the detail.)

ATI HDXXXX + Snowglobe =

Thanks for the advice all...

I managed to pick up a GTX 275; and everything runs great!

Of course, SL still lags like a b**tch; but thats just SL in general, LOL ... overall though, SL runs quite smooth once rezzing and all that is finished. Camera movement is super smooth!