To those having "hadrdware" issues

Please refer to /3/3f/108727/1.html

Hardware Lighting.. alot of you may be running SL on some rather old video cards and or with old drivers that could conflict with this.. however this is not reason for every person with an issue to blame LL or the SL client. Update your drivers and try your luck. Also not a good Idea to hard reset your system unless it totally freezes even then you should wait a few minutes and see if your able to regain control. Hard Reset can damage harddrives, or cause DLL files in use etc to be corrupted thus causing a huge plethora of issues that people seem to complain about. Eg.. IM Clients not connecting, Network connections slow etc.

I do not mean to sound harsh or extra smart here, so I apologize to those who take it that way. Personally I am just a little shocked at how fast people are to blame the game or LL, when most of the time it is a very very common issue that causes the masses to complain.

Last just double check to see that your system is TRUELY capable of running SL

http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php

I would honestly not recomomend barely meeting the requirements and expect to have a smooth ride if you get greedy with the bells and whistles.

nVidia 7900GTX 512 - 50% fps loss in most areas...

/108/ad/110050/1.html

So what graphics card do I buy NOW?

Also remember unlike most games like say .. oh quake 4, doom 3, F.E.A.R etc sl is not INSTALLED on your system. Most of the content is drawn on the fly so not only does your card get taxed to render, but also your gonna get taxed to keep drawing this all new. These prims etc have to be pulled from the servers which is gonna be alot slower for the textures, light instructions etc to get to your card vs accessing them on your local card. Further more with most games the textures are pre drawn and its just a matter of your settings telling your card.. hey .. pick that one.. and slap it on the wire frame. SL you have to realize it has to talk to the server, find out what is gonna be drawn, how big etc, download it, translate it (if you will ) and then draw it. Also going back to not being installed, this means each time you run around using the new lighting system unlike a fully installed game the card does not have the benefit of being able to work with the game and quickly realize where it needs to draw in this and that, it has to wait for it, so yes in part is due to the new "updates" but its also in part due to the fact that when you run sl your not acessing local files and instruction sets as fast as with any other game.

This can GREATLY affect your FPS also are you talking SL's take on FPS or ACTUAL fps ( ??/60)

just for kicks...

Mess around with the Lighting settings.

My personal fps Otto - if my sim fps were that low I'd have been screaming for a Linden from day one!

As for playing with settings, yes, I have, oddly they appear to make very little difference. But why should I have tp play with them?

This update was intended to improve the SL experience and with that graphics card, which was working perfectly before the update, I must be able to run with everything on - if not, what graphic card DO I need?

So you have the best that NV has to offer, not much option but to live with it. Soon they will be out with the 9750 GTX, and the race will be on again. Most people would jump for joy with 50fps.

That wasn't 50 fps that was 50% fps loss!

Eg. 17 where I was getting 42! (yes, I KNOW that's more than 50% loss, but the average is just over 50%)

Oh I'm jumping OK, but not for joy....

I dunno, what are your other specs? My 4400+ X2 performed with really bad frame rates after the update until I set affinity to a single processor. Before the update I didn't really need to set it because the update before seemed to have minimised the duel processor problem but the latest seems to have brought it back.

Also, the 7900 cards are new, heck the drivers for it didn't show up on the Nvidia downloads page until just recently so you can expect problems with it untill they get things straightened out, same thing happened when I got my 6800 Ultra. You might try turning on AGP exceleration or off and see if it makes a difference. Even though I have a PCI-e video card i get almost a 10 fps boost when i turn it on.

Check out my system:

CPU: 0.13 micron Intel Pentium III mobile (797 Mhz) Memory: 511 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600) Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce2 MX/AGP/SSE OpenGL Version: 1.2.2

If you think you got problems try using this dinosaur.

Actually SL runs ok for me as long as I don't try anything fancy like moving too much. There is a good point to having an ancient system and that is that the upgrades make no difference at all. I had bad performance to begin with and the upgrades couldn't possibly make it much worse.