Mac dual G5 + Nvidia 6800 worked for 3 days, now....

Emerald 1.23.5.950 on dual G5 OSX 10.4.11 with 6800 AGP

This new (old) 6800 card I bought worked brilliantly for 2-3 days, then starting yesterday, suddenly drops to 1-2 fps including local chat and IMs

I have messed about with the graphics settings, cleared the cache many times, etc

Any ideas?

My impression is that you're on a wing and a prayer doing SL - especially 3rd party builds - on a non-Intel Mac, and especially so on 10.4.x OS. it's also likely that your 6800 is a hack - a PC card burned with *someone's* weird Mac GPU firmware ROM. There has been at least one official ATi firmware shipment within an OSX software update and the hack cards can self-destruct (or the f/w update fail to load) when these arrive.

(My home box is a middleaged, Intel Mac Pro with an X1900 - real Apple - display card that's just starting to act up. That will teahc me to de-fluff the heatsink 8( )

As I understand this, this is an official original equipment Nvidia card for the dual G5 Mac as sold by Apple, not a hack-burn f/w.

Does anyone know if there are driver updates for 10.4.11 and/or the dates of those? Should there be nvidia files in the system folder?

Hack/Workaround -

If I go into Prefs > Graphics and run the render quality up high, then APPLY, then back down, then Apply again, everything speeds up.

Sounds like some cache gets messed up, and running the quality up and down flushes it.

Behaviour is the same in all viewers, including Lindens.

In SL's Advanced menu (next to Help at the top of the scree, if you don't see it, press CTRL-Option-D to bring it up) go to the Rendering section and check "Run Multiple Threads". That should help a bit.

Do you have any CPU intensive processes running in the background? Use Activity Monitor (in the utilities folder) to see if something else is taking up a lot of CPU time. Sometimes the Spotlight index service can go ape and monopolize the CPU.

1. already running multiple threads, thanks
2. no other significant tasks on Mac, foreground or background, not even spotlight

Another clue; (perhaps) the more avatars that are around, the faster it seems to clog up.