graphics help for an older computer

I'm now running an Nvidea geoforce 5500 fx graphics card. I'd like to upgrade, but money is tight,so I have to use an alternate viewer like Nicholaz. Any suggestions on which would let my luddite machine still work pretty well?

You might want to take a look at the Cool Viewer version of the 1.19.05 (last pre-windlight) viewer, which is maintained at http://sldev.free.fr/ with all the patches required to make it still work.

You can use the last Bleeding Edge (BE) Nicholaz Viewer, version BEz2. It has all the security patches from last year, as well as a few updates. It has been recently updated once again.

http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/

It runs off the 18.5.3 LL viewer. I used it for a long time and it runs really well on older machines. You can also use the Cool Viewer 1.19.5, as mentioned. It's non Windlight as well, and has a few more updated features. It also runs great on my machine, I use it now instead of the BE.

If you are really hardware challenged, Nicholaz Old School viewers may be an option. They are based on the 18.0 viewer, the last non voice viewer.

I've always found the Meerkat viewer from Open Metaverse to work suprisingly well.

an older viewer wont do much good if the sl preferences are set too high.
im looking at your join date now, so i will skip over the obvious and instead mention 'graphics > advanced > texture memory'. i have a 256mb vid card, sl seems to default to half of that, and i greatly increase performance by manually setting it even lower. i currently have it set to 64mb.

I think on my desktop I am running a Nividia 6800? Not sure of the flavor. It runs it pretty well. At the time it was the best card I could find for AGP interface. That is going to be the major limiting factor in upgrading your card, are you AGP or PCIe? '

Edit: And once you start thinking about upgrading your video card, you have to think about power supply. Is your old PS big enough to safely handle the new card? Will the new PS fit into your case?

I just reformatted my pc, I've got a nvidia 8600 and have it set on default, but SL objects are edged with jaggared lines now... My Sl default is *high*. Does anyone know a tweak?

Also does anyone know how to get the @ to stop typing " and vica versa?

I *think* the jagged lines are the "Hardware" button: Turn on anisotropic filtering and set your antialiasing to what you like. I keep mine on 8x, my video card is a 9500GT 1gb.

It worked, thanks,eh


Just got a blue screen to do with my nvid driver, so I've turned off the antialias... See how it goes.

More edit: I can't get good updates these thingies called decoders, so it seems I am stuck with either TV on my puter and jaggarded lines in SL or good Sl and no telly and I'm a telly sponge...

Thanks, I know what it is now...

I recently upgraded to an 8600GS (OEM 8600, slightly underclocked GPU and memory, but way better than my old ATI 9000 and easy enough to overclock to standard 8600 spec) and things run pretty well. Can struggle a bit with a draw distance over 150m or so in some sims, but it's generally acceptable. I don't use the clumsy "Low Mid High Ultra" setting, I set each thing under custom, and have no issues with jagged edges that I can see



Yeah. If you're in the UK, or have a UK keyboard, you need to change your keyboard map to UK in Windows. I don't know about other languages, but the US keyboad map puts @ on shft+2, and vice versa. And Windows has an obsession with defaulting everything to US. Even after you've made it quite clear you're in the UK, it still wants to try and set your timezone to somewhere in America...

Go to Control Panel, Regional, and find the keyboard setting in there.

an aussie keyboard should be using the default us setting.

Ta, I've found an Australian one, Brianna's advice fixed it, but I need better decoders which I can't find... I'll keep at it.