Mac Pro Upgrade help + performance (multi-core)

I am looking to spruce up my current machine to be more SL friendly.

Current Specs of interest
-------------------------
2 x 2.66 Dual-Core Intel Xeon
4 gigs of ram (planning to add another 4 in the next week or so)
Nvidia Geforce 7300 GT 256MB



On to the questions.....


DUAL CORE:
Is secondlife using my machine to it's fullest? I seem to remember something a couple years ago about SL having problems with multi-core machines. Any help here would be great.


VIDEO CARD:
I feel like my nvidia 7300GT just isn't cutting it.
Windlight really seems to slow me down significantly. SL flies when I turn off all the fun stuff. I really don't want to have to do this!
SL seems to cap out my video memory to 128. Is there something I'm missing?

I am willing to UPGRADE my video card & have been looking at several but have a limited budget. I'd like to stay around $150 if possible.

Any help, insight, or discussion is welcomed. I'm also happy to elaborate, clarify, or post screenshots.

Thanks! <3

the video card is where you should look. The memory will help, esp. if you want to run multi clients (I have run 4 on my 20Gb system but it was slow)


You dont say what MacPro you have, 1st Gen, Early 2008, 2009 etc. Im guessing you have an earlier system
?
I had an ATI 1900XT but it died after a year...common problem, I now have an ATI Radeon HD 4870 and that works very nicely, even in the earlier 1st Gen systems.


Feel free to ask me in world or here if you want more info.

I believe the dual core Xeon would be a first generation Mac Pro.

Bring up the Advanced menu (CTRL-OPTION-D), go to the Rendering section and check "Run Multiple Threads". That should give you a performance boost.

Macs use half the graphics memory by default. Changing the debug setting (also under the Advanced menu) RenderTextureMemoryMultiple from .5 to 1 should change that. I'm not sure if changing that setting is a very good idea, though.

Hi Launa.

Get a vid card with at least 512mb. Mine has 1GB. Most SL clients do not take advantage of it, but the Meerkat client does. The rest of the SL clients go as high as 512mb.

It's not. Believe me. It's not.