new card, no improvement

I installed an Nvidia 5700 in hopes of eliminating super low FPS and reducing continual 99% CPU usage.

There has been no or very little improvement.

The computer has a AMD 2.16 gigahertz, 512 MB ram, Windows XP sp 1.

The SL debug and log files suggest that SL is only allocating 32 megs of AGP memory. The card has 128 megs.

Any ideas of how to proceed?

Check to make sure that SL properly detected and adjusted your display and option preferences, specifically the video memory settings?

That allocation thing from the debug log may be something else, like AGP aperture, which I have no idea about, but now that you've mentioned it I'd be interested if someone else could enlighten us. I know it can be affected in BIOS.

First, when you say "super low FPS", how low are we talking about? 15fps? 5fps? 1fps?

In Edit > Preferences > Options, is "Video Card Memory" set to 128MB?

Some systems with 512MB of RAM or less do better if you turn down your texture and object cache. You might try doing that.

What's your draw distance?

Remember, SL will eat up all your available CPU, pretty much regardless of what you throw at it. That's just the way it is. I'm not sure how much you can do about it, though adding another 512 MB of RAM wouldn't hurt. It'd let you run more applications at the same time.

The bottleneck in that machine I would wager is your 512MB Ram.

One thing I would recomend is uninstalling and reinstalling secondlife after getting a new video card. It is the only way to make sure that SecondLife isn't still treating your card as if it were the old one.

SL is primarily CPU and bandwith constrained. A better video card will mostly just let you turn on more features with less performance hit - I have a 5700 Ultra and I run with 2x antialiasing (set in the nvidia control panel) and bump mapping, avatar vertex shading, bump + cloth all on. I keep shadows and local lighting off because I have never been happy with the performance hit for how they look.

Also keep that draw low, 128 - 256, unless you are in a near empty sim (vehicle sims perhaps, new uninhabited sims).

And use Alt-1 to let us all know what 'low' FPS means.

Just another tip...
When changing video perferences, restart SL. I find SL runs like absolute crap when I change draw distance, even when reducing it. A quick restart works wonders.

I also think the draw distance auto-degrade if fps is < xx causes some problems, until you restart.

Like Ama I keep draw distance low, turn off all the video options that are HUGE fps burdens (shadows, lighting), set ground textures to low or medium detail, dump the ground frill, etc etc etc.

With an nVidia 5900 I can get anywhere from 1-60+fps. I'd guess I average maybe 15-20 though :p (2.6 AMD w/1.5G ram, 1280x1024x32 res (game and desktop), AA 2x, Ansitopic 2x).

due to the way 3d rendering works... *almost* any 3d application will push you to 100% cpu usage.. this is normal. It just means that yer system is bein used to its fullest to get you as much performance in openGL (or direct3d) as possible

Uhm... You've checked to make sure that SL is actually set to use 128 MB of memory from your card right?

Your system out does mine, has more ram, better everything... so you should get at least 5 or 10 fps.