Graphics Card Suggestions

Hi All,
My on board graphics card seems to have bit the dust so I am in need of a new card. Does anyone have any suggestions for a relatively low cost (under $125) graphics card that would work with SL? Something that would give me a good draw distance and frame rate would be spiffy.

Thanks,

Brian Livingston

Since you seem to be limited by cost, your best option is the best Nvidia 5200 FX card you can find. It will do the job, but many here consider it an inferior card. You may also want to consider moving up to one of the lower end 5600 FX cards. The 5600s are probably just above your $125 limit.

Thanks
The 125 limit was more of a bench mark so that I didn't get deluged with a thousand "buy the $450 card" responses . One last question... I've noticed that it seems like ther are a lot of differnet manufacturers who make GeForce cards out there. Are they all teh same or are thre some I should stick to or on the inverse, avoid?

--Brian Livingston

The FX5200 is the new MX4 card. It might be ok for SecondLife, or for playing videos, but for anything else, it'll be dog-slow. You'd probably be better off getting a GeForce4 Ti4600 -- for gaming purposes, it's faster than the 5200, and you'll probably be able to get it cheaper.

If you can get a 5600 on sale somewhere, go for it. It's faster than the 4600.

Oh they're DEFINITELY different. Heck, as a former ATI user, nearly 90% of my problems came from using a manufacturer that was 3rd rate, as their card (that used an ATI chip) wasn't even recognized BY ATI. GeForce, while most likely not having such horrible driver conditions, still has differences in quality when it comes to different manufacturers.

I got a Gainward. Haven't had a single problem.

Does anyone have any opinions when it comes to an ATI radeon 9600? tomshardware.com has a review wit hit topping the GeForce 5600 in several benchmark tests.

ATI BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD.

GeForce GEWWWWWWWWWD.

Realize, that ATI STILL has numerous problems handling the graphics in SL. Mostly because ATI can't write a driver to save their own skins. In general, ATI always has more problems running things than GeForce. Heck, even Far Cry, a very popular game that was just released can't run on an ATI card.

I run the GeForce4 Ti4600 (with two monitors) and have zero complaints. Good bang for the buck.

I had a GeForce 5600 XT and Maaaaaaaaan was it slow, eventually took it out and cast it onto my younger brother, then went out and bought a rather spiffy FX5900 (non XT)
which rocks

I also had no trouble running SL on my old Geforce 3 Ti 200

so personnally I stay away from the XT cards.....

<edit> spelling!! </edit>

now i get why farcry would not run on my sysem.....damn now that my gateway store is going outta business looks like i might have to order a computer online.....wonderful technology.....DARN BILL GATES!!

Comedy "buy the $500-600 GeForce 6000-series that's going to be announced tomorrow" response. The power suckage of those cards alone scares me.

Er...aside from that, I also warrant that the GeForce 4 Ti4600 runs SL and runs it well. Oooo, shiny.

I'm pretty pleased with my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. It's a better, faster, card than anything Nvidia is presently offering. Running SL with 6X FSAA is a beautiful sight to behold.

ATI has a historically bad reputation for their drivers. This was a big problem back in 2001. For the most part, these driver issues have been worked out for 95+% of the 3D applications, unfortunately, the SecondLife client seems to tap directly into the weakest points of ATI's driver implementation, namely, texture memory management.

Since I join SL in Feb, the ATI support *has* shown marked improvement. The FSAA support was a big deal. As with some improvements, there's a certain degree of "two steps forward, one step back" as we, practically speaking, lost AGP to get FSAA in SL v1.3.0. (AGP support never crashed my hardware, so I'm still miffed to have the rug pulled out from under me). But, really, Linden Lab is almost there. The only remaining issues are a Catalyst-related texture memory bug and a mysteeeeerius environment mapping (e.g.: shinyness) bug. Rumor has it that Catalyst 4.5, due out in a month or less) will help address some of this.

Should you get an ATI? Hard to say. Going for $211 from newegg.com, the Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro is a really nice card. Its dual-head support is great, and my non-SL applications run stunningly well on it. ATI is the market leader, their cards trounce the GeForces. In terms of SL, your milage may very-- your main CPU/FSB/RAM will probably have a bigger impact on your client FPS than which DirectX 9 card you buy because of the way 3D works in SL.

Good luck!

well the avatar vertex shader fix in 1.3.4 now marks the THIRD of the 'big five' problems i initially exposed in the ati petition thread to be fixed by LL internally... those same problems that way too many of you initially agreed with LL were 'all ati's drivers'. Potentially one of them (the reflection map oddity) is indeed ati's drivers, but the FSAA problems, the speed problems, and now the shader problems were all within SL's codebase.

I've got a fairly strong hunch the texture corruption is as well.

as to nvidia cards the biggest issues with manufacturers are component quality (ESPECIALLY on low end cards) and customer service.

I reccomend evga on *both* more than any other manufacturer hands down.

Their customer support is near legendary... often at their cost overnight cross shipping brand new cards for the slightest problems... and often doing totally unexpected things like issuing all their card owners free copies of dvd playback software, upgrading an existing card to full video in video out support with a free overnight shipped package.

And most importantly for the lower tier cards they use *GOOD* quality components... this is especially critical on the 5200's and the filtering capacitor's on the vga out. Cheaping by a penny on those will cause significantly degraded output quality, blurring.. fuzziness.. etc

my evga 4600's display was *sharper* than a specially modified gf3 ti that i had customized myself by removing those rf filter caps.

thats saying alot about the quality of parts that go into their boards... also some of my friends still use my older evga cards and the fans *STILL* going strong after 3 years... I've had other manufacturers' card fans begin to fail after only a few months