Graphics Card: Am I A Complete Idiot?

Hi folks,

I used to have a Second Life about three years ago, but have been without a home internet connection since then. Happily I'm now back online, and want to get started again, but I need some graphics card advice.

Previously I was using an old AGP card, which worked fine, although I'm afraid I can't remember anything more specific. The advice on System Requirements suggests Nvidia 6600 or better, but after reading up on currently available cards and getting increasingly confused and irritated by the whole thing I went down to PC World and randomly picked up what looked like a reasonably up-to-date model. (There were a lot on the shelf, the box was big and shiny and it was relatively cheap).

My theory was that a) a modern PCI express card must be better than the AGP card I used to have, and b) any graphics card at all would be better than none.

I now have a GeForce 210 card, which seems to run Second Life at a marginally slower speed than the onboard graphics of my motherboard.

Could I be doing something wrong with a perfectly good card, or have I just completely chosen the wrong tool for the job? Or in other words - am I a complete idiot?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

- Ford.

What are your prefs set at? Draw distance? Bump and shinny on and such? Your core clock is 589mhz and memory clock is 800mhz. Its not fantastic, but not horrid either. Core clock and memory clock is generally what I look at when buying a card, the higher the better. Memory ex: 512 Megs means NOTHING when your core clock and memory clock such.

What kind of computer do you have?

Make and model, operating system, type of processor, processor speed, amount of ram, what kind of onboard graphics, for starters.

Many thanks both. Here's the data requested:

Window Size: 1280 x 975
Quality and Performance: Low (Faster)

Bump Mapping and Shiny: Off
Basic Shaders: Off
Atmospheric Shaders: Greyed out
Water Reflections: Greyed out

Reflection Detail: Greyed out (set to Terrain and Trees)

Avatar Rendering:
Avatar Impostors: On
Hardware Skinning: Greyed out
Avatar Cloth: Greyed out

Draw Distance: 64 m
Max Particle Count: 1024
Post Process Quality: Low

Mesh Detail:
Objects: Mid
Flexiprims: Mid
Trees: Mid
Avatars: Mid
Terrain: Low
Sky: Greyed out (set to Low)

Lighting Detail: Sun and moon only
Terrain Detail: Low

PC is a home build, running on Linux Ubuntu 9.10

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L iG31 Socket 775 onboard VGA 7.1 channel audio mATX.
Processor: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU E1500 @ 2.20GHz - 1200 MHz
Memory: 2012 MiB (total), 1572 MiB) free
Onboard graphics: Intel 82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 10)

- Ford

Many, many thanks for your input, guys, but problem solved.

In case anyone searches on this in the future, if you're running a Linux derivative with a graphics card you want to install the proprietry drivers.

System - Administration - Hardware Drivers.

It's easy to forget when you're not installing anything off the CD. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

My other piece of advice is that everything I've got stuck with has been sixteen times less complicated than I've tried to make it. That's a quantifiably provable figure.

All the best,

- Ford.

This is likely your problem.

What happens when you run SL using the GF 210 card? I checked nVidia's driver site for the latest driver for Linux:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_190.42.html

Check check your hardware driver in Ubuntu to see if that's the driver being used.

I'm pretty sure you will have to physically install the card for Ubuntu to see it. I have a 9800GTX+ in this computer and the last time I checked drivers being used by Ubuntu on my Linux drive it was not that driver at all......but I don't run SL with Ubuntu since the viewers are so flakey for that OS so I can't tell you if I have a similar problem. Reading what cards the driver supports, mine is listed.

Just a thought.

editing because you did what I basically was trying to get at.

Great you got it fixed.

Thanks for the response, Peggy. You're all wonderful people. May your camels be fruitful and multiply.

And since everyone was far too polite to mention it, we never established the answer to my original question.

Yes, I am.



- Ford

I would say you are not a complete idiot...but Nvidia has implemented Maximum Confusion Naming Policy to cause this sort of problem.

The Nvidia 210 has 16 processing cores, about the same as some of the better integrated video chipsets but well under what most dedicated cards have. I do not know what you had before, but there are a number of AGP cards that will do better than the 210. Really, AGP v. PCI v. PCI Express2 really matters more for high end cards. Low end cards can't generate enough data to fill the bus anyway, so the slower speed is less important.

Yeah, if Ford is a complete idiot, we all are complete idiots. Especially when it comes to graphics cards with all the features that think we need or the manufacturers tell us we need. The two camps that say always upgrade to the latest or (like me) who say only upgrade when necessary and not always to the latest.

If you can get it to work to your satisfaction, you're a genius.