What Graphics Card NOT to buy?

Hi I am still trying to decide what Computer to buy and I am so torn cause I read about some people with new ones who cant even log in to SL.

I know I need a good Graphics card and there is several types on the market. Could I get some responces to what NOT to buy (graphics cards) I say NOT cause then I can stay away for those. Thanks

ati

I have had good results with Nvidia, in particular the following cards:

6600/GT
7600GS/GT
7800GT
7900GT

All have 256MB of video ram, and are a mix of AGP and PCIe interfaces.

I tried ATI, in the form of a 9550, and then an X800GTO, both of which I found disappointing and way below par, in comparison with NVidia.

What Digital said.

ATIs are not evil incarnate but they do not work as well with SL as Nvidias do. High end ATIs are ideal for DirectX games but are not so good with OpenGL based games like SL. They work well enough to play SL but I recommend Nvidia if all you want is an SL computer. Stay away from low end ATI especially cards like the 9250 and the x200. Low end Nvidia as well like the MX400, 5200, 6200. They will barely work if they do at all. Stay away from cards with SE, LE. lite, etc. as they are reduced capacity cards salvaged from the reject bin and aren't that much cheaper than a full function card.

Anything not made by ATI or Nvidia or based on Nvidia or ATI designs. Avoid Intel based video solutions as they are not supported. Most don't work, some may work today but that may change at any time.

SL will work great on a moderate card like a 6600GT coupled with a hefty processor like an AMD 3800+ , duel core AMDs like a 4400+ X2 or even the new intel core duos. Also, get at least 1 gig of memory as SL is a memory hog.

Forget the Geforce FX 5000 series, they have very slow shaders,
useless for todays Games (example : Oblivion sucks with a 5000 series Card).
The 6600GT is quite fast and cheap, make sure you buy a good (powerful)
Power Supply for your PC, this Card needs it. (ok, all fast Cards need it).
A midrange 7000 series Card might be even better, maybe a 7600,
but i didnt try these, so i'm not sure if its worth the Money.

So far i used the Following Cards with SL :
MX 200/64 MB : very slow, pure horror, no shaders
FX5700/128MB : slow, but playable, died during the hot Summer
6200/256MB : a bit slow, i got a bad Card from PNY, fails at DirectX Games
6600GT/128MB : very good, quite cheap
ATI 9800/256MB : works for me, too - but i still prefer NVIDIA

Thank You all so much for your help!! I really appreciate all the responses and it makes my choice of what to get alot easier.

It is a bit scary trying to figure it out when you read about so many people buying new but cant log in to SL.. alot of money to spend and not be able to play. Thanks Again! )

my laptop has an ATI card and worked fine back in 2004 but since around October of last year started locking up every hour - 5 min. Comes to find out that an update at some point in time made SL not able to correctly identify my ATI. Kept saying that I had a unsupported card that was a far lower model then the one I had.

Built a new system a couple of weeks ago with a suprizingly low priced Nvidia 6800GS 512mb. Its amazing after the experience I had. I now can run poser and SL at the same time, constantly flipping back and forth with no issues.

Im buying the geforce nvidia 6600 LE today so hopefully I'll be able to eventually play Second Life! also upgraded RAM to 1Gb - fingers crossed I can now get SL working

the geforce 6600 did it - bought the video card today and now I can get onto second life and stay on, look forward to meting all of you wonderful people on second life real soon!

Has anyone tried SL with a Geforce 7900 GTX 512MB with or without SLI or the new Geforce 7950 GX2 1GB card?

I have an older video card a

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra/AGP/SSE2

and I have to tell you it runs SL like a dream even with my low system memory situation.

I pull 40+ FPS most of the time.

GeForce 7950 GX2 here, almost no lag, works very smooth, thought it's still expensive I couldn't resist buying one...and I don't regret it, hehe

Don't waste your time with a 7300 card, they're priced to sell because they're vastly inferior to the rest of the 7000s and most of the 6000s. You'd do better with a 6800 GT or GS.

Thats good, That card, Even though expensive, Has 1GB of memory and its the first card that will do Quad SLI.

nVidia 6600GT and above or ATI X1800 and above.
At least 1GB RAM.
Remember SL is also CPU hungry. It uses 99% of my old AMD 64 3000+, I have x2 4400 now.
It looks slower when Cool n Quiet is on, but I can't verify that. So set your power option to Always on to play SL and see.

An ATi X1900XT will work fine with SL given that i has better OpenGL support than the older cards of its line. Working like a charm for me anyways.

ATI has a LONNNNG history of "needlessly funky hardware and software design", things like 15 bit color 23 bit z buffer 18 bit screwball this and that ... and wrap it up in a slow moving plush driver UI ...

ive had my assortment of ATI cards in the past, for the mostpart they work well ... but for the same price i can get Nvidia ... with usually better image quality and about the same performance without the headache of "is game X going to work in MCGA?"

Integrated video:

Intel/sis/etc just stay the heck away, even nvidia integrated video (on the nforce series) is far from fast, and far from stable.

anything *NOT* ati or nvidia:

many of the 'super budget' cards by third party manufacturers run powerVR or even stranger chips, those are *NOT* sl compatable and most of them never will be... in a cruel twist of fate often times a 1 generation old nvidia card will be *CHEAPER* than these 'budget specials' and perform significantly better, even if on 'paper' the numbers (raw mhz) are lower...

*dual card anything*
while it might help quake sometimes, it will provide absoluely *NO* benefit to SL since any card capable of rendering SL at all currently will run it just fine and SL does not use any fancy shaders that could be helped by a second in line GPU. If you absolutely must use like 87X fsaa and 1826X aniso filtering ok go nuts, but it will onyl make your screen prettier, not faster, and even then its probably overkill

so.. what *TO* get

i'll cut it into several brackets here:

*I AM BROKE*

Here you want to stick with nvidia 6200 cards, *not* the 'le' or the 'turbocache' etc ones jus the plain 6200's. They are no power houses but believe it or not do not need to be, as long as you stick 1280x1024 or lower, and don't turn on fsaa or aniso texturing, you can run SL fairly well (10-20fps dipping 6-8 in REALLLLLLLY busy areas)... Just this past week circuit city had a passively cooled 6200 for $50 AR, I picked one up and put it in my media computer, and believe it or not it runs SL pretty well now.

*I will not pay more for a videocard than i did for my game console*

This branches out, about the $100-150 area. What works best in this area is 'older' revision hardware, from ati or nvidia if you can find it, things like 6600GT's, 6800's or the x1600 types on the ati side. Beter than the new revision 'budget' stuff the older rev stuff will give you great performance at the expense of not really doing a couple of 'whiz bang' fancy things (that SL won't do anyway). if you absolutely *MUST* get a new gen card, try and look for one that has a minimum of 128 bit wide memory access, and that has all *ON CARD* ram, 'turbocache' is crap (as anyone who has a stock mac pro now knows)

*I want SL to run its best*

This can branch into the just shy of $300 range, here you will find the 'second tier' new hardware, aka instead of like the XXX XFX superX XTREME 79XXGTX you will get the one cut down, the 7900GT, for nvidia or the equivalent 'one down from the best' at ATI. Any card in this area will really give more than SL could ever take. Here you are talking more about playing resolutions *OVER* 1600x1200 *WITH* fancy features like fsaa to make it even better looking. This is all about quality here, not performance, and you will have quality to spare.

*I AM MADE OF MONEY*

so you have an extra $1400 you have nothing better to do with... ok... chances are your SL experience will be better buying a new island, than trying to go this nuts in graphics (since sl is so cpu-bound) but hey who am i to judge.

At this bracket you are going DUAL, mebbe even QUAD things... and you are still going to be *WASTING* >50% of yer gpu cycles. Sure you can max out fsaa, sure you can pump aniso to the max, but unless you are running like a PAIR of 30" monitors and need 8 million pixels pumped every refresh, chances are at least for SL, you are just literally throwing money away. If you want to pWn your quake buddies, go ahead, but this won buy you a single fps in SL over what a $300 card would.

homebuilt 7900GTX (not SLI'd), 4600+ X2, 2G mem running at 1900x1200x32, 4x AA/Ansio (for SL anyway). Playing in a maximized window (SL appears to use a television ratio of 16:9 :p so I've never even tried "Full Screen" mode (which should be 16:10 ratio for a monitor). SL runs at around 30-60fps with most options at full or nearly full settings, draw distance just at 128 though. Staring directly at the ground I'll get about 50-70fps (far from what I'd expect. On my 2nd box, 3500+ A64 6800 AGP I get >120fps staring at the ground, but most graphics options turned WAY down).
I don't consider SL a good platform for spending a lot of money on a high end card, the payoff isn't that hot, imho. A good mid-line (6800s, 7000 series, other than 7800/7900) would suffice I'm sure, and save some money. The performance gained just isn't that spectacular. Nothing looks THAT good in SL anyway. However, in a "real" game, the 7900 rocks (well plus I'm pushing a huge resolution, I need some power for just that).

you can actually set the ratio yerself, 16:10 is a rather 'simple' ratio actually to figure out i.e. 1.6:1 so just put 1.6 in the aspect ratio box for fullscreen and ye'r good to go

I just picked up a BFG 7600GS OC 512MB (DDR2) for $150.

I couldn't bring myself to drop any real money into my current box since it's recently turned three years old and is running an AGP mobo and this card seemed like the best bang for the buck in AGP land at the moment, though the Leadtek 7600GT 256MB (DDR3) card at $175'ish was tempting too.

I haven't put the new card in yet, but I have been doing some baseline testing and will gladly report back.

For comparison's sake, my current box clocked a whopping 302 on the 3DMark 2006 benchmark! (Go! Go FX5900 128 MB Power!!!) The folowing numbers are using the 91.47 drivers straight from NVidia with the card running at factory speed, followed by the numbers using the NGO HQ mod'ed NVidia 91.47 drivers with the card clocked up from 400 MHz to 445 MHz.

More relevant to this thread, I have cranked up all my graphic options (enabled everything, maxed the sliders, etc.), set draw distance to 256 and TP'd to a few places and let things settle and noted the following approximate averages for FPS while in mouselook with my crosshair on the objects noted:

Suffugium (101, 116, 34) staring at the top left button on the security panel keypad: 14 FPS/26 FPS

Arena (142, 46, 57) Sitting in the chair under the "Pleasant Surroundings" picture and focusing on the lazer sphere over the dance floor with music playing and video playing but sound from video turned to minimum setting on the movie control volume slider: 7.5 FPS/7.5 FPS

Amundsen (0, 2, 2) Sitting on the ground (underwater) and staring at the intersection of the four corners of the neighboring sim property lines: 20 FPS/40 FPS

Badlands (204, 130, 23) Staring at the hollow part of the "d" in "Bad" on the sign over the DJ booth: 4 FPS\5 FPS (47 main Agents present)

I'll report back with new numbers once I've had a chance to swap out the cards...I'm also reconsidering my decision to get the 7600GS 512 instead of the 7600GT 256.

Any first-hand experience regarding higher VRAM cards in SL? Seems like it would be a no-brainer were it not for the DDR3 in the 7600GT instead of the DDR2 in the 7600GS. What would Torley do?