pci express

I recently upgraded my motherboard and video card to have an GeForce 6600 PCI Express card and SL is only seeing it as a PCI card even though it does see the 512M DDR2 memory in the video card. I am not sure if SL is using the full capabilities of the video card just by saying PCI instead of PCI Express. any way to know if it is?

SL barly touches 128mb ram use on video cards, alot of the things your card can do isnt touched ever.

No benifit in SL having over 128mb vid ram ~.o

Well, I hope that changes one day. I bet textures would load better if they used more of the card memory. Video cards have more memory in them for a reason

Graphics RAM is highly important in SL than any other game environment, since the content is seldom optimized or under the control of the developer.
You can walk into a mall and it quickly fills up your RAM and start to lag or see gray.

Other things like light maps, bump maps and anti-aliasing settings also chew into your RAM allocation. Running at higher resolutions also take up more RAM.

I've noticed however, the AGP setting makes no difference in performance, on both AGP and PCI-E cards. Probably something else is the bottleneck.

Normal ram is important for SL, not vid ram , can see no diffrence on the pc's i use , SL dont utilize much of what a modern vid card can do.

6800 agp 128mb (mums temp pc i had to fix ~.~)
6800 pci-e 256 mb
7800 gtx 512mb

Max vid ram use i ever see online in SL even with
1600x1200 resoultion on all is about 96-130 , SL barly utilize all the vid ram you have, that is the most i ever seen with max all options + local light + 512 view distance,, normal ram use was about 1280mb tho ;P

Check your vid ram use when youre ingame, SL badly use availible gpu ram, why i dont know, but setting gpu ram for SL 256-512mb ram is of little use, it dont use over a certain point ,even with 1000's of textures in view.

>> ok ill bite myself, they appearantly did something so now it does use more video ram, managed to get it up to 187mb use with 512 view distance : p playable...uh not really but hey it finally went over 128 constantly (yay?)

I've done the same tests myself to proove to the people complaining that they dont have the 512MB option for there video cards that it wont make much of a difference from 256mb setting. Agree 100% and I have similar results.

However, PCIe video cards ARE generally faster than any card you may have had a couple years ago. I upgraded my PC in January and noticed a HUGE difference in frame rates, texture loads, and so forth. However my new video card isn't the reason for this, after all I did upgrade to a newer CPU as well.