Will SL work with Radeon X1950XT on XP?

Today I ordered a complete new system. I had my eyes on a nice Geforce7950 card but this one was not on stock, no idea when will be available, so I changed this to a ATI 1950XT. Now I'm reading about all problems with ATI (mostly vista related though). Will this card work (nicely), or am I better off getting a Gefore 7600 or so ? (I found the 8800 to be a bit too much for me).

The ATI card will work nicely on XP, the problems are specifically Vista related. Hopefully in time, ATI will release drivers for them that will work on Vista, however, if you do plan on upgrading to Vista soon, I would go with the nVidia card just in case. Otherwise, the ATI card will work

Nicole is correct The ATI card is going to be killer on XP for running SL. I honestly would not even think of upgrading to Vista for a few more months. Just like every previous windows release.. give it a bit of time for the major bugs to be stamped out. People still run Windows 98.. so there is no reason to rush into things

Thank you very much Nicole and Cirga. Do you own this card ?! I know the card should be very good, and its just such a shame buying another one, just because that one game will give problems.... but yes... its about the only game I play

I would wait myself. Rumor has it that now Vista is released ATI will have a significantly better video card coming that is 100% Direct X 10 compliant and will put Nvidia cards to shame. The Nvidia 8800 series are not DX 10, they emulate DX 10 functions . Since there are only 2 DX 10 games out right now.. Nvidia is betting no one will notice.

Which games are those? I didn't think DX10 games were going to be out for awhile.

MS Flight Simulator X and another game I can't remember, Crysis or something.

If I waited every time something new was about to come out I would still be playing Jet Pac on my ZX Spectrum....

The 8800 are a bit above what I want to spend on it, and looking at the reviews X1950XT seems to perform even better than the 7900GS. Not sure if this is true for secondlife though.

Having experienced first hand the wonderful (NOT) Vista Premium, I would suggest giving it a total miss.
The OS turnned off my soundcard (disabling it completely) as it didn't recognise my headphones. It replied when trying to enable it, that the headphones weren't WDRM compliant and would send to Microsoft (via Warner Brothers) for a 'solution'.. 2 hours later the 'solution' read: Contact your supplier and request they supply hardware that is WDRM compliant.... well thanks for that useful information MS.

Second life reported that my graphics card drivers was out of date, (ATI card at the time), none available, so changed to a top range NiVidia GC, Vista loaded some generic driver again SL wouldn't load (old driver report again), when trying to locate new drivers on the NiVidia website said 'Under Construction'.

Result... XP installed, now have expensive ice scraper Vista CD for sale.

Amd yes.... it works! What a difference too! Its nice and fast with all options turned on. Of course I'm using a freshly installed XP so that makes everything fast as well.... Only had crashes when I switch from full screen to windows or vice versa. I can live with that... Dont see much point in full screen anyway.

I still have to check other games and the high resolutions....

Vent, I run SL on the X1300 512mb AGP card and it runs pretty nice. 2 little side notes just in case in the future you run into issues. If you start seeing a lot of crashes, just ensure your power supply is more then adequate for the amount of power needed for that card and all other devices you have hooked up. Right now I run on a 500W power supply and I get crashes every once in a while as the combination of the vid card and all the other devices causes a bit of a drain sometimes, if I overload it Which I am known to do lol. The other thing is drivers. I use the Omega driver set for ATI instead of the standards. To me it seems less taxing on the system, but if yours is runnning good right now leave it as is...these are just things to keep in mind if you see any issues down the road.