A few questions regarding video cards and the Second Life engine

Hey guys,

I'm new to Second Life (spent most of my time in There till now) and have noticed that my framerate has veritably plunged in here compared to pretty much every other 3d game I've played.

Quick specs:

AthlonXP 2600+ (333mhz core)
512 megs DDR333 ram
GeForce4 MX 440-8x
7200rpm IDE 8meg buffer hard drive

My Detonator drivers date from August of last year and I recently updated my AGP bus drivers (alot better since then, I might add, 8x good). I am rather loath to update the Detonator drivers to something more recent as the last time I did this, my framerate actually *dropped*, so unless Nvidia did some truly amazing update in the last few months, I'd rather keep it as is.

Now I've heard through the grapevine that SL is going to be using a new engine shortly, or at least a vastly improved update to the current one. I have also heard there are some noticeable graphic improvements in the 1.4 preview, but unfortunately, I don't have access to it as I just joined (yes, I tried). I'm not sure if the engine update was refering to the preview or for some future update after that.

Now, I *am* thinking of getting a new video card, as I could generally use the boost, but I heard that SL seems to have real problems with ATI video cards, rendering issues of some sort. This poses a bit of a problem as par for par, from word of mouth and some time spent on Tom's Hardware, it would seem ATI constantly trounces Nvidia cards in virtually every comparative benchmarking test.

In case you ask about my internet connection, I download at around 2500kpbs and upload at around 600kpbs (haven't pinged the server, mind you, I'm not at home at the moment).

Anyways ... any ideas, comments, information you can impart? I would dearly love to fly at nice high speeds without rubberbanding, having my framerate drop to screenshooting speeds, or crashing ... in general, to make the time spent in SL as smooth as possible. Thanks in advance.

SL doesnt need a very high frame rate. It was designed to be playable at 10fps. This isnt quake
Your card does suck, but dont worry too much about replacing it. SL needs more juice from the CPU than the GPU, really.

Karl --

Your video card is the weak spot in the system right now. I would upgrade your drivers, if they are really a year old then you are probably still mindful of the MX bug way back when where SL had trouble rendering avatars and ended up slower. But that bug has been long quashed, and keeping up to date drivers is always good.

You could always go for more RAM. I went from 512 to 1024 and saw a noticeable improvement in performance, and went from a GF2MX 32mb to a GF FX5900 128mb and saw a noticeable improvement in eye candy. Framerate is about the same, but I went from 1024x768 and no options checked to 1600x1200 with most of the options checked, so I'm content. Oh, P4 2.26GHz processor all along.

As Eggy said, this game isn't meant to run 60fps because it's streaming, the data isn't right there on your computer so it can process it in a snap. I get on average about 15fps. I could probably get more if I reduced some of my settings but I like the visuals.

As for the vastly improved engine, perhaps you have heard about Havok2. That is the physics engine, and much of the improvements will be server-side, so they won't require any user to upgrade their hardware. And the graphical improvements in 1.4 are there so you don't have to buy new hardware to support the game. LL doesn't want to alienate anyone, unless you're trying to run something under the minimum specs and they can't support you (which you're not).

What kind of budget are you looking at? If you want performance, upgrade RAM first. It'll even help for non-SL computer usage. If you want eye candy, then your video. If you can, do both, you'll enjoy SL that much more.

Thanks guy

Any info on the hazard of using a high end ATI card instead of an Nvidia one?

ATI users still experience visual artifacts AFAIK, issues between SL's OpenGL usage and ATI's drivers. Not sure if anyone has seen improvement in the 1.4 preview... and I don't have an ATI card so I can't test.