Does SL run ok on ATI 9600?

I have a radeon 9600, and second life runs EXTREMELY sluggishly on it, even after the latest catalyst drivers are installed.

My girlfriend has an NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 and it runs about 500 times faster on her card. Surely there shouldnt be such a huge difference in speed between these 2 cards.

Even when I put mine into 800x600 with a low draw distance its slow and jerky.

What goes?

Hey there sugarat,

I used to have a GeForce FX 5600 256mb card (from a CHEAP vendor) and had nothing but problems with it (overheating, frame tearing, poor fps), so I switched over a few months ago to a GigaByte ATI Radeon 9600pro 128mb and it has been smooth sailing ever since, beautiful performance right out of the box. I didn't want to have an overheating problem, so I installed a slot fan (only $6 or so) in the slot right below the card.

"Sluggish" performance is kind of a subjective term, though. I have been in relatively unpopulated sims and had 60fps at 160m draw distance, and then if I go into a heavily populated area, my fps can drag down to a crawl (like 5-6fps). I average around 150 ping so it's not a bandwidth problem so much. Also I noticed that performance is slightly better in mouselook mode than in 3rd person view.

Best thing I can tell ya about graphics cards is DO THE RESEARCH, and READ THE USER REVIEWS before you buy anything. You will get a pretty good idea who makes a decent card and who makes $hit. Hope this info helps!

Peace & Happy Building,

Artillo

PS: my system is an ASUS P4P800 motherboard, 2.4GHz Pentuium 4 processor, 1 Gig of PC3200 RAM, 3Mbit cable connection, just for comparison.

Even at lowest draw distance, lowest everything:

I get about 0->10 Frames Per Second on my ATI 9600 with a 1.3MHz machine.


It fine for chatting and coding. *pout*