sapphire Radeon 9600 pro 128mb

I had to stick in this old card while waiting for a replacement. I downloaded and installed the most recent drivers from ATI. As this card is on the "approved' list as better than minimum I would think I could function with it. Instead despite setting things as low as possible my cache totally fills in 3 minutes or less, depending if i dare to move or clik on anything. Any activity in my presence accelerates the problem.

ANY suggestions other than the non-helpful "get another card" variety, would be very appreciated.

Max bandwidth 1400
Disk cache 1000mb
Draw distance 64 meters
vertex and bumpmapping-off
normal avatar
sun and moon only
Low terrain detail
graphics card mem at 128
music and video - off
default upload 32kbps
voicechat-off

MSI k7n2delta AMD athlon 2500 3gb sdram, tons of bandwidth.

How can i squeeze this pig? cache and reboot every 3 minutes is really painful.

Seph

What do you mean by the cache fills up?

If you mean the sl cache, its on the hard drive and unless you have a massive inventory and thousands of textures, I can't see your drive filling up unless the partition is very small.

I'm running an old GeForce4 MX440 with 64meg and it runs sl fine hour after hour after hour. The computer is an older CPU with 1gig ram.

Some ideas:

Is onboard video disabled?

Has the computer been scanned for viruses, spyware, root kits etc?

Has the sl cache directory files been manually deleted and the trash emptied?

Has the C: drive been defragged recently?

Has the registry been checked with something like Registry Clean Expert?

What operating system are you running? How much free disk space is there?

- Dina

cache: if any building, dancing or manipulation of objects I GRIND to a utter halt in minutes or seconds. I manually clear the cache, reboot and am ok again until the next episode...about 3 minutes. I can run around in an empty sandbox with no issues.

checked fragmentation it was minimal defragged anyway. 64% HD unused- 49gb remains

How would I check if my onboard video is off? do you mean the video on my motherboard? I am not aware it has any. the card works for everything else. movies WoW etc.

removed and reinstalled SL.

bought the reg checker, ran it and corrected it all, still does the herky-jerky dance



running XP pro

ran:
ad-aware
trojan hunter
spybot
AVG

found nada

This all began when my card blew and I had to stick in this older card.

Dina, thank you for responding, any more help would be greatly appreciated.

Try running mem386 and make sure your ram is squeakly clean. It has to be booted from a cd or diskette. Let it run over night.

Clear the Temp folder buried in the Document and Setting directory. I don't know of any way to clear this out except manually.

Another program that is worth running is Spinrite at level 4. It will check your hard drive. It will take a while as well.

- Dina

Hmm. Even tho you've done a great job stepping down your graphics prefs, it sounds like your graphics setup is falling into a bad state. Three things to try:

1. Maybe your local cache file is borked. Try completely deleting it, instead of just clearing it - you will have to reset your preferences. On XP, it is at: C:\Documents and Settings\<your userid>\Application Data\SecondLife

2. Try throttling texture loading resources. Counterintuitive, but I'm thinking perhaps your card cannot cope with the flood of textures coming into it. In SL's preferences, set the network bandwidth lower, and set the card memory to LESS (yes I've seen that help. It certainly won't hurt), say 64MB.

3. Does your graphics driver have its own setup? Some even have a little web interface to set them ... you can get strange crashing/lockup behavior if one of the OpenGL params is set wrong. I set the bit depth to 16 instead of 24 once accidently ... it took forever to figure out.

Whoa, drop this to 500 or below. Really-really. Over 500 hurts more than it helps, even on a big pipe, let alone DSL or cable.

Download a recent client and use the Lag Meter on the Help Menu. There are three indicators that are really well-implemented for the tough job they are forced to do. You can see if your problem is client, network, or server related.

My guess is network. A Radeon 9600 128 is a fine midrange card, just starting to show its age.

dropped max bandwidth to 500
turned on meter once I hit a data rich environment my client frame rate drops to 10 and my network shoots up to a connection ping time of 600 and says possible bad connection or file sharing app. If I leave it be it sometimes drops back to normal. Or if I clear cache and reboot.

as it seems the network is the real offender, as molly switchblade suggested, what can i do, given the card I am currently stuck with? Thanks again all of you.

I can't see your video card causing network probs. I've run older ATI Radeon cards in other computers with SL and its been OK. Something else is going on.

As other people use this card without trauma, what may be causing my network issues? everything is fine unless 1) people are building near me 2) people are dancing near me 3) I am building or moving objects. I seems to wind down and cannot move. If I then clear cache and reboot Im fine again. In a high impact area i last 1-3 minutes before the next bog-down. I dont believe its my ISP. I have cleaned the registry, no ad ware viruses or trojans. Its as if something is mis-set.

At this point its almost amusing, a mystery that must be solved. NO other game, software or program has issues. EVERYTHING began after sticking in the emergency card.

My download speed is 1,269 kbps

My Upload speed is 558 kbps

My latency is 111 ms

All Portland to SanFransisco

Open to all suggestions