System requirements

What are the system requirements for optimal performance with all graphics options turned on for this version and for the next version of the rendering engine?

What draw distance?

With the current rendering engine and any hardware currently available, I wouldn't try for a draw distance above 256 meters. If you want to be able to run with a draw distance of 512 all the time, you'll need hardware from at least two years in the future.

yeap, turning on everything max will chocke any machine , but its not that bad if you are on a island sim with no neighbours, and not tooo many people.

I use 512 draw distance on island sims, doesnt hurt me to much, but if there's more then 10 people near me and i have local lightning on /chocke

Draw distance 256 I guess. I am probably gonna buy a new computer soon, I just wanna make sure it's good enough and compatible. I was thinking of maybe something like a celeron 2.6GHz with a GeForce 6600, I'd like something that would give ok performance also a year in the future so I'm asking to find out if that would be good enough.

No, the Celeron is terrible. Get a P4 or Athlon64.

(See here for benchmarks.)

Also, remember that SL is CPU-bound. It's going to rely heavily on your CPU and ignore your graphics card for the most part. Video RAM is important, but SL is not like Quake -- you're not going to be able to get away with a great video card and a crappy CPU in SL. A Celeron and a GeForce 6600 are going to be left in the dust by an Athlon 64 with a GeForce 5200, even though the prices are likely to be comparable.

What sort of price range are you looking at?

SecondLife uses the CPU for the heavy work of rendering, and the graphics card for eye candy. A 3+GHz Pentium 4 (or a 3000+ Athlon) will give you a good framerate, and a 6600GT or 6800 will let you turn on things like shiny, bump mapping, and insane levels of antialiasing.

(Oh yes, and be sure to get at least a gigabyte of memory)