Is XFX GeForce 8600GT XXX good for SL?

UPS just delivered my XFX GeForce 8600GT XXX, 256MB DDR3, late yesterday and Ill be installing it today.

Will I see a decent improvement over the integrated GeForce 6150 I was using? In terms of LAG, frame rate etc?

Thank for any info

You should see a huge improvement, however you may need to work a bit to find the best version of driver to use. See the sticky thread at the top of this forum.

I recently upgraded to a 8600GT and found it to work best (so far) with driver version 163.75, which is not the most recent version. You can download the earlier drivers from http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-2k_archive.html

It will feel like an entirely new game.

You'll soon find out, then tell us all

If you are using Vista, it will find a tested driver for your card on Windows Update site. I don't know which version number it is......but it works very well. Depending on sim/region I get from 20 to 60 fps.......unless the grid is lagged.

I've just upgraded my card but have minor problems because I can't enable the water ripple nor the avatar shader,yet I can do so fine with my older card. Is there something I've missed? am running the nvidia drivers 169.25

Open your nVidia control panel and set your card to "quality". Setting it to performance turns off a lot of features that make SL work better. You can tweak it further by going to "manage your settings" and clicking on the global settings.

Sounds like you have "performance" selected instead of "quality".......I believe performance is default.

Thanks everyone for the info, my OS is Windows XP Home Edition

in the nvidia control panel it is set to quality.

I've just done a quick check with the gpu caps viewer. and it seems the 8600 and 8800 cards have 0 vertex and pixel shaders.

the submissions can be viewed here.
http://www.ozone3d.net/gpu/db/

They quit using shaders in the 8000 series:



more:
http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=637

Admittedly, they're not very kind -- apparently the 8600 is slower than the 7600.

Still happy with my 8600GTS anyways. It was cheap
($120us) and works good enough for me.

yes I'm beginning to get a grip on this now.
However I've just dug around in some of the other threads and found that when I installed the old nvidia drivers 163.75 (from softpedia), I have all the ripples and flappy clothes back. Hooray!!!

Read all the way to the end, including the update. With newer drivers the 8600 starts to look faster than the 7600, and even the old driver versions that are recommended here are still newer than the drivers used in the article update, so the 8600 advantage has probably improved some more.