Any high end card above 8800-GTX available ?

Just wanted to clarify that the issues with the ATI HD-4870 and SL are easily resolved by editing some settings. Great card but I don't believe it would give you the performance increase you are looking for.

Is this in the right forum section?

Hi;

I am quite satisfied with my 8800 GTX so far. But i noticed that sometimes the frame rate drops below 15 in complex environments. And camera flight mode sometimes is stuttering.
Thats not so good for high quality machinima productions

Coco. Of course you are right. Even the fastest GC would not be able to resolve lag effects coming from Client server comunication bottlenecks (whatever causes them). But i still think, there are some parameters which CAN be improved with faster hardware. I particularly see following (machinima relevant) aspects:

- Does it run smoothly in camera flight mode ?
- Does it give good anti aliasing results ?
- Does it support advanced shaders ?
- Lighting effects, glow, shiny, etc...
- And just to mention the experimental client which introduces "true" shadows.

All this stuff does not count to client/server based lag. But it may count to performance on the viewer side. definitely. So, to summarize:

I would not gain anything, if my current GC would keep rock stable and fast with Ultra settings and all i see is comunication lag. But i doubt this is true. from my experiments i see performance issues, which most probably can be cured by using a faster GC. Although i must admit that i am pushing the system to its limits, e.g. you might consider 15-20 fps as absolutley sufficient. I would never like to fall below 30 for some technical reasons. So what i am searching for, might not be needed by the "average" SL user.

See: I could tweek the settings of my GC a bit and gain 20-30% in terms of frame rates, still having a good "user experience". But i would loose this very last bit of extra rendering quality, which i want to keep in my productions. So i have a strong reason to look for the high end hardware.

And i think, Chosen Few has hit the uselessness of comparing SL with computer games in very clear words, look here:

/327/be/287262/1.html

I hope, that all gives some clearifications

regards,
hussayn

The main speed trap is Sl's objects that need to be loaded into your cache.

Hi
I create a lot of professional machinima and have encountered many of these issues myself in the past.

Coco makes some excellent points which have still not been fully explored I feel. With pleanty of RAM there are some significant speed increases to be had by reconfiguring the cache. I use 'Virtual Hard Drive Pro' by Farstone to define a RAM disk, then I go into the SL client are redefine the cache to be located in this RAM disk. Close and reopen SL to activate this change and let it replenish it's cache to the new location. Now you have blazing fast RAM based access to your cache instead of waiting on hard disk access times for everything you need. You do need lots of RAM to pull this off but no pain no gain and if quality is everything then you'll need to get the right kit, of course.

Hope this helps.

Frankie Rockett / Planet Video.
www.planetvideo.co.uk

I just went from a 8800GTX 360Mb to a 9600 512Mb and really I'd have to say the performance increase is negligable.
I suspect going above a 8800 might be a waste just for SL as also the 8800 is a rock solid standard GPU as far as comatibility with pretty much anything goes now and for the next few years.
Having said that, I'm not sure whether there's much improvement upgrading between a 7600 and 8800 either I haven't tried it.

Somewhere i have read about the numbering scheme of nvidia cards.
it was said, that the first digit is just the series number, while the secnd digit tells about the capabilities. If that's true, then a 9600 should have less capabilities compared to an 8800, it's just a newer card series... Then wouldn't it make more sense to compare 8800 against 9800 ? Anyways, from the reviews on GCards i learned, that the increase in performance is not overwhelming between 8800 and 9800 cards either...
regards,
hussayn

Hi
I create a lot of professional machinima and have encountered many of these issues myself in the past.

Coco makes some excellent points which have still not been fully explored I feel. With pleanty of RAM there are some significant speed increases to be had by reconfiguring the cache. I use 'Virtual Hard Drive Pro' by Farstone to define a RAM disk, then I go into the SL client are redefine the cache to be located in this RAM disk. Close and reopen SL to activate this change and let it replenish it's cache to the new location. Now you have blazing fast RAM based access to your cache instead of waiting on hard disk access times for everything you need. You do need lots of RAM to pull this off but no pain no gain and if quality is everything then you'll need to get the right kit, of course.

Hi
I create a lot of professional machinima and have encountered many of these issues myself in the past.

Coco makes some excellent points which have still not been fully explored I feel. With pleanty of RAM there are some significant speed increases to be had by reconfiguring the cache. I use 'Virtual Hard Drive Pro' by Farstone to define a RAM disk, then I go into the SL client are redefine the cache to be located in this RAM disk. Close and reopen SL to activate this change and let it replenish it's cache to the new location. Now you have blazing fast RAM based access to your cache instead of waiting on hard disk access times for everything you need. You do need lots of RAM to pull this off but no pain no gain and if quality is everything then you'll need to get the right kit, of course.

Hope this helps.

Frankie Rockett / Planet Video.
www.planetvideo.co.uk

I just discovered yet another way to accomplish this in a much better way than making a RAM disk. In Edit > Preferences > Graphics > Hardware Settings, change the texture cache to 1000 or higher. Note that you will still hit swap if you absolutely need the memory for other things.

Thats not the same thing... increasing cache size, simply increases the HD cache size, not memory.

If you want to save memory from being overly tasked, in the Graphics Tab, click the Hardware button and make sure the memory setting there is slightly less than your graphics card has onboard (not including shared memory of some 'hypertechnologies' say you have).

If you have a SATA II Raid system with multiple discs on seperate controllers, allocate one for Windows Cache and one for SL Cache (both seperate from the HD your OS and SL are loaded). You might also try using a USB ramdisk, although USB isn't that quick.