So you want the best graphics ?

Quite sick of the poor graphics and frame rates of SL so decided to upgrade my PC. Ebay and £450 later I have ended up with a quad core PC with 4gb of RAM, 500gb HDD and two, yes I said two, nvidia geforce 8500 GT graphics cards.

So why two ?

The motherboard is SLI which means it takes two graphics cards, joins the abilities of both, and uses them as one. The graphics cards are 512mb each and the results......

Took a little tweaking to get SL to use both cards but wow. Frame rates of 25 - 30 @ 192 draw distance with all the others settings at max. So, being brave I had a go with windlight client.

Wow is not the word, F****** wow would be more apt. OK the frame rates are 20 - 25 with the graphics slider on high but even so.....

Need details? IM me in world. Best £450 I have ever spent, and it's new, and he sells lots of these.

Just thought I would share..

not bad

I don't mean to burst your bubble, but I am getting FPS numbers of around 18 at the high setting (not ultra) of Windlight. Did you mean "ultra" when you said High?


my system:

3.0 Ghz hyperthreading chip
1.75 RAM
FSB of 400
Nvidia 6600with 256 Mb of RAM

I'm sticking to the mid setting (21-25 FPS) for most of my SL time and switch it to high for picture taking and being "amazed"

Ultra drops me down around 10 FPS

these FPS numbers were all taken in the same sim

*I'm LOVING Windlight*

on the island i can have 512draw, max settings every where and run around happy with 20-25 fps,i got to the mainland with the same settings i crash

all depends exactly where you are for ppl to compare gfx cards/systems

I dunno what you paid for two 8500s but my 8800GT does about twice that. similar specs, Q6600 processor tad overclocked. ultra settings with the draw distance reduced to 192.

Guess that's about right, you paid about half what I did for both of yours .

Good to hear you Guy's are getting good results.

Reason for the post was just to make a point really. Little money, good results, if you know where to look.

The compare was made from old PC to this new one. The old PC was borderline 10-15 fps and died in a busy sim. This one is a whole new story.....

And no, I did mean high and not ultra, very little visual loss between the two but a major performance gain.

Windlight does rock, or it will when they get the last of the bugs out....



As I said, £450 for the unit with the cards

Welcome to Resident Braggs or is that Resident Bloggs ..

Umm .. what was teh question again ...

Resident shruggs ??

Where are the draw distance settings in the Windlight viewer?

I was under the assumption that the "Quality and Performance" settings of Low, Mid, HIgh, and Ultra dictated the draw distance.

yes, but when u select the custom check, u can manually alter all settings including draw

Using dual video cards in SLI or Crossfire mode is a great way to seriously boost framerates, but only in games where rendering is the primary concern. MOST semi-recent video cards can render SL in windlight no problem, and at good to very good framerates. Once you pass a certain amount of video memory, system memory, and CPU power, then you end up waiting on the LL servers to update you. You've hit the max SL performance wall. Anything more and it's wasted resources because it doesn't make your turbo ZOMG setup any faster than the guy who just keeps up comfortably. It's the same catch 22 as pushing 300FPS thru your video cards, but your monitor can only handle 140 because you've outpaced it's refresh rate (maximum update speed).

k, thanks Alicia

I'll check it out later tonight.

4 gigs of ram are a waste of money. 2 will do the same exact thing and for much less.

Not necessarily so. 4 gigs are not totally utilized when using Windows XP, but they are fully used in Vista.

Not true at all. It does depend on how you use your computer, but the statement 4 is the same as 2 is just not the case. Using Maya, SL, Photoshop, firefox, various instant messengers, something to play music, maybe bittorrent, and whatever other applications du joir, there's a noticeable difference between 2 and 4.

I would recommend a 64bit operating system for people with 4gig. Vista 64bit, XP x64 if you don't want to use Vista, or Linux if you're comfortable with it. The reason you want a 64bit OS with 4gig of ram, is that a 32bit OS only has 4gig of address space total, and it has to use part of that for addressing things other than RAM, like video memory, and some other things too. usually a 32bit OS will end up only using about 3.2 of 4.

It is true that each application can only use 2gig, even in Windows 64bit (except for some very special cases). They're NOT limited to the SAME 2gig though, so running a single application gains some advantage with more than 2gig, and running multiple memory intensive applications gains a large advantage.

I'm not sure what each application is limited to memory-wise in Linux or OSX.

This is inaccurate advice for the reasons already stated, and as anyone simulataneously using a number of intensive applications will know.

I have Intel quad core Q6600 @2.4GHz with 3 GB Ram and 1 Nvida 8600 GT with Windows Vista Home Premium. Have a wide screen (i.e. about 11 inches high by 17 inches long) with a standard refresh rate of 60. Broadband is 8 with achievable 6ish

The computer is rated at around a Microsoft scale of 5.2 on a max scale of 5.8

The machine takes a long time to boot and its best to let it do its thing before touching anything.

The Vista sidebar (useful due to the add-ons) takes some time to boot in itself but with a resource meter loaded Second Life consumes around 60% of graphics resource and 50% of processor power.

For those experts here would it be really worthwhile for me to add ram or another Nvida card?? Interested in views

My SL settings (not windlight) are towards the higher end of all detail (but not max) with a draw distance of 125 meters. At those settings it runs quite well with almost no lag at all

I can up draw distance to the max 512 meters and still move around but with a tad degree of lag.

I can also run streaming windows with live data feeds at the same time as SL plus use MS word.

I think I have a top end machine and for me SL is now okay, however my previous machine (3 years old) struggled with SL to the point where it was becoming unusable.

Final comment - I suspect many folk have less powerful computers, as for me at this time I am at the start of a 3-year buy/own cycle of which I have done since 1985.

On that basis and if possible I think Linden should improve existing coding/server hardware to enhance performances rather than add more software detail, else SL may become unusable for all those who do not have top end machines

3gig? typically memory is interleaved to double it's effective clock speed on modern systems, but somehow I thought that would require an even number of sticks. What motherboard do you have? I don't think I would add another video card personally, not for SL, but if someone has experience before and after having turned on SLI, it would be interesting to hear.

you want to really test your system, go to Kenroku gardens with all your setting at full.

You always get one don't you......

LOL

Asus Striker Extreme Mobo
Intel Dual Core E6550 FSB 1333MHz
4 GB Corsair SLI ready 800 MHz
EVGA 8800GT superclocked edition 512MB DDR3 tweaked with RIVATUNER for temperature control, those card can go up to 80 degrees C.

Windlight pedal to the metal settings= 68fps in very crowded areas, more than 96fps sailing.

Hope that help.

Just wanted to add, I just priced next year's upgrade for my system (newer AM2 CPU, DDR2 RAM, etc) and all together its a WHOPPING....... $380.

Dual Core 3 Ghz Athlon X2 6000, 2 Gig of DDR2-800, and the SLI capable motherboard.

Not bad. Not bad at all. I was gonna just toss in more RAM for my current setup but I figure I'll just hold off till Income Tax Return time & let Uncle Sam pay for a new system instead.

NOW- if you need the video card as well, add another $150 to that for the 8600GTS and yer good to go!!!

Its all about shopping around. Just like SL!!

LOVE that place! Nicely done area. A bit slow to rez and I noticed the FPS changed depending on the direction you faced.

But here's mine:

Hehe, you blanked out one, but not the other... can I have some money ?

Which way to "Resident poke your nose uselessly into everything" perhaps might be a good question?

Hmm sorry have done so, from 2Gb to 4Gb and although improvement to running SL was not noticeable, the difference running SL twice and other intensive applications is noticibly better. I realise I only get 3.5Gb usuable but I couldn't find 4x .875Gb sticks

i use 3 gigs in dual channel. even # of sticks = 2x1gig & 2x512mb