Video Card Opinions......]

I am currently running an ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500 w/ 64M RAM.
For obvious reasons I am going to get an Nvidia card. Here are my choices:
#1 - NVIDIA GeForce 256MB FX 5700 8X AGP 256 - $190.00
#2 - OEM MSI GeForce FX5200 128MB DDR, 8X AGP Video Card with TV-Out - $40.00
#3 - Geforce Ti4600 128Mb DDR AGP/VIVO/DVI CARD $145.00

Which would you get? Please notice the price on #2 - are the others THAT much better?
Is there an option that you would reccomend that I have not listed?

1) If money is no object, buy it. 5700 cards are (supposedly) noticably better than 5600 cards. However, a 5600 can handle SL well, so consider one if the price is good.

2) Avoid like the plague. 5200 cards are budget cards.

3) If money is an issue, aim for this one. Faster than the 5200, but is literally last year's card.

I have #3. When I got it option #1 was $250. It works great for me.

and the Ti4600 is year before lasts (not that its a bad card)

I just upgraded to a 5700 myself and having come from a GF2 32M I cant say how much better than a 5200 or 5600 it is.
I *can* say however that its like night and day. From the reading I've done though the 5200 really *is* that budget. And the 5700 is quite a sight better than the 5600.

Remember that to make use of 256M of video ram you need a Gig of system ram.

I'm still running Win98 so I opted for the 128M 5700 which I found for $150.

I used to have a All-in-Wonder ages ago too... and while the lure of the VIVO cards was there when I upgraded to a GF2 I also found a deal on a Hauppage WinTV card and I definitely wouldn't go back. So nice not to have to change tuner/recorder apps with vid card upgrades.

Hope that helps.

UU

I have an FX5200. Works great. Dont diss something just because its cheap. Games are made for the lowest common denominator, and the vast, overwhelming majority of people buy the cheapest cards, or get them by default with their computer.
Buying high-end stuff is a waste of money, unless you're too rich not to care, or have a framerate fetish.
I bought a really high-end computer, and in retrospect, it was a giant waste of money. While most of it is still merrily chugging along 3 years later, if I had bought something cheaper, I could now buy a cheaper PC again, that would be twice as fast as this old fart. Actually, for SL, the graphics card doesnt matter as much as your internet connection's bandwidth & latency, the CPU speed and how much ram you have.

I also only have the FX5200. Also check your AGP slot rating. Mine is only rated at 4x so getting a higher end card would also meen a new motherboard.

The only difference between 4x and 8x is the number. There's no performance difference.

Of those three cards, I would go for the FX5700 if you can afford it.

The FX5700 is based on a substantially better core than the FX5200 and FX5600 cards - in particular, I believe it has substantially better performance floating point pixel shaders.

The FX5200, in particular, is SUBSTANTIALLY fill bound. We've found that in many cases, a plain vanilla GeForce 3 Ti/200 is often faster for the purposes of Second Life. Compared to your Radeon 8500, it's probably a wash - except without the driver issues.

What I'd say is that the Ti4600 will probably give you the best performance on SL for RIGHT NOW, but the FX5700 will serve you the best for future games (and potentially future revisions of SL) that use pixel and vertex shaders more heavily - i.e. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2.

AGP is always backwards compatible, so the AGP speed of your motherboard doesn't necessarily matter. Honestly, I haven't done AGP 4x vs. 8x testing yet. Theoretically, it should help us quite a bit, as we spend a LOT of time doing AGP bus transfers, but I wouldn't be able to tell you how much.

I COULD be tempted by an ATI, but we're still working out various driver issues with them - and they also appear to be very finicky about the quality of your motherboard and power supply.

For what it's worth, the card that I have in my personal rig is an FX5700 - but that was partly driven by the fact that I dropped a Zalman passive cooler on it. And my spending habits are known to occasionally be, um, ridiculous.

- Doug

5200's are basically directx9 enabled gf2/4mx's... yer ati 8500 will run SL faster, avoid like the plague where possible

the 4600 is a good card but out-dated already an tho its all ya need for SL, it'll lag behind new games comin out pretty badly..

best bet is whatever 56/57/5900's ya can buy... and yes you CAN get a 5900 class card around $200 that'll toast the 5700 so its kinda at weird point in the market that i can't really reccomend

OK - Thank you very much for the replies!
I havent bought card yet, this is the one I am considering.
Not only does it seem like a great choice - Its got an LCD read out! That will look so cool......
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 256MB 8X AGP 256 VIVO
Here is a link to ebay site:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2785912209&category=40161
Let me know what you think as I plan to buy tommorow.

Looks ok.

a much faster clock rate...

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-128-162&catalog=48&depa=0

5900 for $209 on newegg.com

they will actually run SL roughly comparably (thanks to the expanded memory on the slower 5700) but the 5900 will toast the 5700 in most precompiled (aka single player) games

course its not blue an doesn have a lcd panel...


its yer call

I've seen a few Pixelvision cards over the last couple of years. I'm sure they are about as reliable as any other Nvidia based products, but I've always found their card design and packaging to be amusing. I look at the cards themselves, and (to me) they look like something a Power Ranger would stick into his/her machine. I can almost hear the generic heavy metal guitar riff when I see one.

Back on topic now. It seems like an adequate card (better than the 5600 I'm running now) and the price is good too.

Good day all,

I just bought the GeForce FX5200 AGP. I'll see how well it does and report back in a few. BTW, with AGP speeds (2X, 4X, 8X) these do not boost preformance of the Cards calulations or, the rendering speeds. Is is only the speed at which the AGP bus gets the information from the motherboard. Someone above mentioned the speed (4X, 8X) do not increase preformance. This is true but, the speed allows the bus to get the data from the board faster which in turn, allows the graphics card to process the received data quicker instead of waiting for the next data buffer to be received. So basically it doesn't inprove preformance. it only allows the AGP card to get the buffer data faster.

I have a TI-4200 which is the budget version of the 4600. It works great with SL. Many times I've seen people complaining about the lag and I don't see it.

It is outdated though. From what I've read you should take a good look at the 5600.

I am running the NVidia GeForce FX 5200, 128MB with no problems, that I have found!

I just recently purchased a 5700 for 160$ after the rebate.

fen-

I just received my 5700 and paid $137.00. Check www.pricewatch.com for the best price..

The difference between 4x and 8x doesn't matter very much in other games, but for SL, it might. SL handles loads more textures than any other "game" out there, and it does have to swap them out from time to time, i.e. whenever lighting changes (assuming you have lighting turned on) or the sun moves. And of course it has to add them whenever you move around, or something new moves into your area, like an avatar.

Eggy's assertion about buying cheap stuff doesn't ring true if you are at all interested in the quality of your gaming experience. You get what you pay for. How is that 5200 going to handle Half-Life 2? Something released in 2005? I got a 5900 and even though it'll be running HL2 in DirectX 8 mode, I know it'll beat the tar out of a 5200. It's better to spend $200 on something relatively close to top-of-the-line that you won't have to replace for two years than it is to spend $60 on an overclocked and re-badged GeForce 2 that turns in poor performance numbers with stuff released today, let alone next year.

Greetings,

I've just signed on today and am trying to enjoy a years worth of membership, but I think I'm either doing something wrong or I dont' have the right stuff on my computer for it. This is not known for a gaming mashine, and while it's a new computer, it's a cheap one. So I'm worried that my lagging on the orientation island is probably either my comp, or something on my computer.

I hear all the fancy things everyone here talks about and I never see mention of the one thing I have an:

Intergrated Intel Extreme Graphics

I had looked my computer up, and others that they had, and the ones with the fancy things that everyone here talks about (AtiReadon thingies) are 3000$ systems, which for sure I can't afford any time soon.

So is there anyway for me to play this game with what I've got, or is it a lost cause and I may as well pack my bags and come back when I get a much better system...

Intel Pentium 4 procesor at: 2.40 GHz
Windows XP home
128 MB shared DDR SdRam
40 GB value hard drive
that intergrated Intel Extreme Graphics thingi

Please let me know...thank you...becuae I think this would be one game I would enjoy.

Aazaria Kojima---

PS: if I only have to buy something and put it into my system i would love that, but sadly don't know anyone near me who could...uhmm open up my system to stick whatever I bought into the computer...so either way if what I have is not good enough I probably have to cancel and return at a later date.

Aazaria, based on your computer details, and I could be way off the mark here, but I'm guessing you have a Dell. This isn't a problem, I know people who've great experience with out-of-the-box solutions. However, sometimes the machines that come with integrated graphics don't have an integral AGP port on the motherboard...basically, there's no way to plug in a new video card that will substantially outperform what you have already running, let alone display Second Life at its best.

I don't see a machine on the current Dell site that comes stock with a 2.4 GHz processor, so the information on the website probably isn't accurate for your system. Before even looking at new video cards, check your computer's documentation to see if it has an AGP port.

Also, you could stand to at least double your memory from 128 to 256. You'll probably notice better performance overall.

These are settings that I recommend to people to get the highest frame rate and/or help avoid crashes:

For those who own an nVidia brand video card:

Under Preferences / Display tab:
- All checkboxes listed next to "Performance Options" are UNchecked.
- Avatar Rendering is "Normal"
- Terrain Detail to "None"

Under Preferences / Options tab:
- Check ON AGP Graphics Acceleration
- Texture Cache Size is set appropriately
- Set your video card memory size. (Some people have remarked that setting it one notch lower than your actual video card memory size can improve performance)
- Object, Tree, and Avatar Detail sliders are all the way to the left
- Checked ON Avatar Vertex Program
- Draw Distance to 64
- Bumpiness Draw Distance to 0 (10 is default)
- Max Particle Count to 256 (the default is 4096, you can also disable particles with < Alt-Shift-Equals > )
- Outfit Composite Limit to 5 (no idea what this does, I think 5 is the default)

For those who own an ATI brand video card, I recommend the following differences from the nVidia owners:

Under Preferences / Options tab:
- UN check AGP Graphics Acceleration (always do this for stability)
- Set your Video Card Memory to 32MB (but only if you're getting corrupted/strange/black textures)
- UN check Avatar Vertext Program (if your avatar is folded up in strange ways)

Note: Some ATI bugs will be fixed in 1.3, so after 1.3 is released, any or all of this could change.

For the Intel card, you should probably stick with the nVidia type settings, and only switch to the settings I recommend for ATI cards if you're having crashes...

Hope this helps =)