Gtx285

Hi folks,

I need to buy a new PC and am seriously considering nVidia's GTX285. Could anyone out there who uses one tell me if Second Life plays nicely with it? I really don't want to buy a new computer only to find it has major issues in SL.

Many thanks for your help

Yes it's ok as almost any nVidia card.. about performances, well they would depends on wich resolution you use and your gfx settings (ie: a 285 (but neither a 295) would be enough to run SL at 2560x1600 "maximized"... mabe a 3-SLI would ). I won't scary you a 285 is a very powerfull card, and it would ok for anyone.

I run a gtx280 ALL settings maxed at native 1680x1050 and it cuts through SL like butter, I've run higher resolutions without noticing a difference, but prefer the text size larger. the only thing i've noticed is that SL doesn't recognize what the card is (so I manually played with the settings) other than that no issues, even with the newest drivers.

I run a GTX260, which is the same but with slightly less peformance, and it works very well. The frame rate is at max more or less continuously, movement is very smooth compared to my old PC (which in no way was slow).

The only drawback is the usual problem with newer nVidia drivers, the lack of support for palletized textures. You will need to disable palletized textures evey time you log in (done in the Advanced menu, under Rendering - Features). However, this is temporary, as the next SL Viewer release is said to address this issue.

I noticed this theme with lots of users, oddly I've never had a problem with the nvidia drivers and palletized textures (which is a legacy feature for 8bit textures btw) using both a 260 and a 280 with the newer drivers (had the former as a placeholder while the company I ordered from fixed their misorder) SL obviously doesn't need it, does it enable some speed ups for older cards that do fully support the feature? genuinely curious here