New player hoping for help with Graphic Preferences

Greetings,

I just recently installed SL and JUST got started. I was rather impressed with the staggering array of graphical options available...but also a bit confused. I found the FAQ on what the preference settings do and read that...but still have a few questions I was hoping someone might help me with.

For reference for the questions that follow...immediately below are my system statistics.

Alienware Intel Pentium IV 3.2 Ghz
2 Gigs Memory
ATI 9800 XT AGP video card with 256 MB Memory
Soublaster Audigy 2 ZS

1) In my graphics options is a checkbox to allow use of the AGP port. My video card (ATI 9800 XT w/ 256 MB) is an AGP card, yet this checkbox is grayed out and unselectable. Is this a bug? Is something 'wrong' here?

2) What sort of settings on the graphics, advanced graphics, and audio tabs would you suggest setting given the hardware platform above? I read the FAQ but was really hoping to get some advice based on my system specifications above. My personal preference is visual quality slightly over performance...meaning I'm always willing to sacrifice some frame rate for nice visuals. I'm still on the orientation island, and started out by simply maxxing out all the graphics settings and ended up with an average frame rate of around 25. However, being a newbie, I know that won't be accurate when I get to the mainland and there are other players around and other things to see. I'd like to get my graphics settings at least 'pretty much' set up now...and I can always tweak a bit later and was hoping someone might have some suggestions. I was hoping someone would tell me either "Nope....you're going to slow to a crawl on the mainland" or "Go ahead and crank up the settings...you'll be fine".

3) When I was on the orientation island and trying out dragging & dropping different appearance (shape & clothes) combinations to my avatar...I noticed that it takes a quick second or two for all the details on the textures to display crisp and 'sharpen'. No big deal. However, as I watched, I noticed that every few minutes...here and there....the textures on the avatar would 'blur'...and then re-sharpen. Is there something I'm doing wrong, something I should turn off, or something I should be setting to prevent this? Or will SL always do that...just periodically have avatars get a bit 'blurry' and then sharpen back up?

4) This is a bit off subject....but does anyone know if SL will allow you to run multiple instances of the client and, if I were to purchase multiple accounts, have multiple accounts running at the same time allowing me to ALT-TAB between them?

Thanks in advance! Any and all advice is much appreciated

Take care

1: Ati in SL wont support agp acceleration, nvidia does tho, if you get it to work its pretty crashy apperantly.

2: Biggests hits in SL are view range (suggested : 128m ) and local lightning, LL is bit wonky, but pretty , i only use it at sims that has no neighbours or to many AV's.

10-25 fps is normal for SL , also 1-5 fps if you encounter prims from hell toruses and loads of avatars can draaag it down alot.

3: SL downloads constantly so you need to rez (texture/draw/render) constantly when you encounter new things, wich is pretty annoying, but it does cache, unfortunatly its very easy to get gigs of download a day if you travel alot in sL , alot of variation out there.

4: make a shortcuit that says -multiple at end
"C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" -multiple
then you can start several SL's might need window mode tho.


\o welcome to SL!

Thili answered your questions but I wanted to add that I have learned that SL has a problem with dealing with cards over 128m vram. I have a 512m card and it does not work well at that setting even with being a supported card in preview. The reason? From Dan Linden yesterday and I quote "we don't have any fancy shmancy 512MB video cards to test with here... yet". I guess my point is SL really isn't set up for cards over 128 so if you are having a lot of problems with textures fuzzing in and out a lot, try backing down to 128 and see if it slows it down (everyone has this occasionally). The 256 seems to work ok on the main grid for me so far but I haven't paid much attention to it until now.

I'm using a GeForce 6800 GT with latest nvidia drivers and here's my 3.5 cents.
The card works great, renders images quite sharply and quite rapidly, (road runner broadband works great), I tried tinkering alittle with the video card settings but was quite frustrating, So far the card itself works great, I think I have crashed by video reasons only once every 2 weks.

I use windowed mode and standard 1280X 1024 resolution, so got pretty much good psace to play and use my desktop.

The video settings I'm using right now are the default for "Quake 3" preset on the video advanced settings with a digital vibrance of 30%.

Have tried using local loghting but really slows me down, trying to improve that a little by playing with the debug menu on what to render and what now (clouds usually go away since I don't like them )