A fix if you have nvidia vista problems

I've spent the last week pulling my hair out after getting a new vista PC, I dug deep and got a nvidia 8800 gts, so imagine my frustration when I discovered that it ran fine for about 2 minutes then the frame rate droped to 2fps. I now have it running at a about 25-30fps which is acceptable and playable and may improve once the SL client becomes vista compatible.

The fix is simply this, right click your SL icon that you use to start sl, select the compatibility tab, tick the little box for run this program in compatibility mode
set it to XP service pack 2

Hope this helps anyone else out there who have had issues.

Sam

I wished this worked for windlight, but it doesn't... the cloud layer is still black for my vista box running a 7300SE card.

I never had stability problems on Vista, but my drivers were always up to date. Which is kicking my butt now with Windlight because its a bug in the new drivers that is causing the clouds to render black.

Hmmm, I had tried that some time ago but it seemed to make no difference, but maybe it works better on a single core CPU.

One thing that really makes a difference on a dual core is to make sure that "Threaded optimisation" is OFF in the advanced settins for the driver. WHen on it uses 100% of both cores and actually gives you a 20-30% frame rate boost! It multithreads the open GL driver. Sounds gret huh?


Well unfortuately as soon as you get a few avs in the picture SOMETHING fails miserably and frame rate drops like a stone. Turning your camera away it zooms back up to 40-50 fps then you turn back and t's at 3-4 fps.

Turning that feature off means somewhat slower frame rates, only 50% of your CPU being used but the overal performance and stability of SL is greately improved.

This fix also did not work for me; I'm running an Intel quad core machine with an NVidia 8800 Ultra video card.

-Dreamy