Video Card question with Windlight

I installed Windlight on my older pc which has a Geforce 6200 A-LE, WinXP SP2, 1 GB RAM, AMD Sempron 3000+ 1.81 GHZ and Windlight ran fine (once I figured out the proper settings.

However, I installed Windlight on my new pc which has a Geforce 6150, WinXP SP2, 2 GB RAM, AMD Athlon X2 Dual 2.50 GHZ and Windlight had problems. Did see the clouds but couldn't see the water reflection.

The first pc is older and slower but ran Windlight fine. The newer computer is faster but ran Windlight with problems? Is it my video card?

BTW: We did issue a jira bug with this. But I'd like to know if anyone's had problems with GeForce cards and Windlight

Running a 7600 here. No major problems. I did notice something funny though; the stuff in the distance always looks like ocean even though I'm looking at land. Like waaay distance, past my draw distance.

on the old pc, I did have avatars and big objects (like full houses and trees) disappear after I was in search. I about freaked out!

I'm thinking I have to update my drivers

Try unchecking Client / Rendering / Object-Object Occlusion if you're suddenly missing big portions of a scene (that you didn't have in camera view before).

You can tp away and back again as well, but that might be a more clumsy work-around.

I am guessing here, but that 6150 is probably integrated graphics. From what I have read about the 6150 and from personal experience, the 6150 can use up to 128MB of system RAM, which will definitely affect SL performance.

The 6200 isn't much better than the 6150, but it has its own dedicated video RAM, and is not sharing system RAM. The newer machine has more RAM, but some of it is being diverted to the 6150 chipset, which slows down the whole system.

It may also be the dual processor. Read somewhere that those can be wonky with SL in general.

not to mention system ram is usually much slower than the stuff they use on dedicated video cards, which you notice as a loss in performance

Do you think there will make Windlight compatible with more drivers? Such a shame--the sky looks so good to me, but WATER is horrible.

nVidia FX 2500 mobile with 512mb memory--doesn't show Windlight water. It looks like blue playdough. ICK!

I'd like to see that lol...

sorry

Hope they do though, but somehow I doubt it

Running apair of 8800 GTX-OC boards with 756MB ram/piece in SLI from BFGTech on XP-32 bit Pro, 2 Gigs DDR2 RAM and a board socketed with AM2 6400+ X2.

Windlight with all the bells and whistles on, all sliders locked in slots to the right, all buttons checked (Updated to latest drivers and I can run water shaders and atmospherics at the same time) - No problems with stability, performance, nothing bothers this machine. ;3

Might need to upgrade a little bit....

On my older single core 32-bit AMD Athlon 2000+ with nVidia 7900 GT on an AGP Pro 8x socket and card w/512MB RAM and the main system RAM being DDR-400 and socketed up to 1.5 GBs is just slogs along barely. Maybe 20 FPS if I am lucky and no advanced hardware shaders enabled, Medium featureset selected. It's the same if I socket in there my FLASH-Hacked ATI x850 with doubled core and RAM speeds from bone stock. (All 16 pipelines enabled instead of factory shipped 12-essentially an X850 Platinum series card now.)

Amazing what a generation leap in hardware can do. Even Linden Labs said that only 20% of thier current clientelle based upon hardware surveys can use Windlight in an enjoyable manner.... so, thake that as you will too.

To answer the question posed by the OP, make sure that you have the most current drivers for videocard *and* mainboard. When I upgraded my videocard (7600), I had the current drivers for it but neglected to update the AGP drivers for the mainboard. Once that was done hey presto - all was good!!

There is a known issue (please see JIRA) with certain Nvidia GPUs and Windlight under XP. It seems to mostly affect GO cards - ie, those in laptops. You can read about whether this is your issue at http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-925

Thanks, Gilian! I was hoping to see this.