Advice on video cards!

Hi, I just signed up for SL and downloaded the program this morning. When I tried to run it I got a message to change my settings from 24 bit to 32 bit. Unfortunately, after spending hours at it I figured out that my video card sucks and is not compatible with this game but plays everything else fine!

I'm not technically savvy and can barely understand the basics so if someone can help, I'd appreciate it.

My computer is a Pentium 4, 2.6 Hz processor, 1 gig Ram, 100 gig hard drive, 2 - 80 gig hard drives, 500 watt power supply, Asus Motherboard, Windows XP professional, SiS 6326 AGP video card.

My question is what would be the best video card to get for this system without paying hundreds of dollars? I've read over many of the threads in this forum but I am more confused as to what would be compatible and what all the terminology means.

Thanks for any help!

For agp anything from nvidia 6600-6800-7800-7900 series , 256mb video ram recommended. (ati , dont ask me, not a clue anymore)

Higher you go expensier, no idea on prices over there, trouble is some of these can require alot of power, if your current powersupply isnt up to it you can end up having a unstable pc.

Thank you Thili Playfair, for the advice. Another questions if I may: the nvidia, are they the Geforce video cards and not the Radeon. All the Radeon ones seem to have the words Ati in front of them.


I understand somewhat what you are saying about the power supply! I already burned one out, it was a 450 watt but we added more stuff to the computer and didn't realize that we needed more power. I was told that the one we just bought and had installed gives us TRUE 500 watts unlike the one we had in there. Do you think with the above stuff, 3 external drives plus 3 big fans I would need a bigger power supply if I went with one of the video cards you suggested?

500watt shouldnt have much trouble with any vid card unless you start using sli/quads,and alot of harddrives.

Ati / Radeons
Nvidia / Gforce

So yeah thats right, i still use a humble 500watt on 6 harddrives, 6800gt,2dvdburners, fans...um do i want to count , 6x92mm, 2x120mm

Noob to the game. Getting horrible Framerates (7-11fps). Does anyone here have similar issues. My system specs are below. I play WoW with aroudn 60 fps.

Pentium D 820 (Dual-Core) 2.8GHz
2 GB PC2-5300 RAM
nVidia geForce 6600GT 128MB(PCI-Express)
SATA HDD's

What types of frame rates are you all getting? The 6600GT is not an outdated card really. I have tried this on my XP partition and my 2003 partition, with no difference. Changing the detail settigns and resolution seem to have no impact honestly. (800x600 vs 1280x1024, windowed or not). This game looks really interesting, but this really isn't playable as is.

Mozox

I've been reading over this forum and doing research online as to what alot of terms mean in regards to video cards. Apparently switching out a video card is not that difficult to do yourself but some people say they don't have enough room in their computer for a new card or it won't fit. I'm not sure why? Is there a way to check this out before I buy one and try to install myself? Are they bigger than what I have right now? Should I just let a professional handle it?

Yeh some name brand pc's dont use a normal case lenght/height , then some video card can be to long, its rare but it can happen.

Its very easy to fit one in, you can open case and look inside yourself , i guess some warranties do break on some pc's if you do that
(they still do this? i remember a friends compaq had a sticker like that)

Any shop can do replace a video card in about 5 min to , but it will cost you, beats me how much tho.

I don't have a brand name computer. I've got a big metal gamers case with flicking lights but with the 6 drives, fans, tv tuner and what not I guess I shouldn't have a problem!

Thank you for all your help, it's much appreciated!

Greetings! And welcome to SL. Once you get yer card installed, you wont want to leave!!

I have installed my video cards a few times. It really quite easy! I really dont know where you are from, but in the US call the Geek Squad! They will look in yer puter for freeand tell you what size you need.

Cause at first I had bought the wrong type of video card. Wouldnt fit in my slot! But the store was very nice to let me exchange it.

Also..the people from support for the cards can walk you thru it right on the phone!

Good luck and hope to see you inworld

Although I agree with most things said above, there's a few points i wish to make :
u]secondlife
[/u]

1. asset server issues (there is no good reason that this should affect FPS)
   
2. renders constantly even things you cant see (it shouldn't, if you have a look at the frame window there are a number of jobs that clearly are related to geometry and occlusion culling, also, high end gfx cards shouldnt have any problem with the number of triangles being rendered, geometry in SL is simpler than most games where you have instances where a single monster contains 500-1000 tris)
   
3. avatars in SL can totally kill your pc (prims) (this should not be the case, have a 20 prim ring shouldnt be relevant if the camera isnt close enough to see it, better LOD could help perhaps)
   
4. avatars skin textures can be from 1mb to 24mb in size (this is a network issue and also not directly related to FPS, or more accurately, it shouldnt. The only reason why this will cause some performance issue is due to texture swapping in your gfx card memory, but this would imply that if you stay at the same spot for a bit the fps should improve, modern gfx card hald 512mb of texture data, occasions where more than that is needed should be rare)
   
5. texure size 64x64 to 4098x4098,and thats alot of mb when you have 1000's of them in a sim (not all visible at the same time though, i also believe LL should limit the resolutions of textures, if 4096 (not 409 x 4096 is actually allowed they should remove that. you'll end up with people sticking huge textures on tiny surfaces. I think even high end games will only use textures that large quite sporadically, and with much better visual results. There's no good reason to have more than 1024x1024 textures in a game where prims cant top 10mx10m).
   
6. streams everything to you wich make it even slower, one day in SL can easy beat 500-900mb download, do that for a month youll be downloading about 30gig+ (network and fps should be completely independant, if you're familiar with the MVC design pattern, the engine, which is the "model" holding the state is updated by the network, the "view" of that model is simply rendered as often as possible, as shown by the frame window it's here where SL spends most of it's time, i cant think of a valid reason for this).
   
7. all SL content, sims, players variety, scripts, various things you can do is unmatched, to bad its also super easy to grief this place -.-; (true, but i cant help but think that that should increase lag, more than raw fps, or at least, it should cause extra load within the parts that manage the scripts, geometry and input and such rather than the raw triangle pushing).
   

Then again, maybe i just dont get it. I still think the difference shouldnt be this big.