nForce = GeForce2 but SL still won't load

Hi folks,

My motherboard has an nForce chipset, and the GPU is GeForce2. Still, when I start, I get this error:
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Unsupported video card
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Your video card appears to be a GDI Generic, which Second Life does not support.

Second Life requires a video card with 32 Mb of memory or more, as well as
multitexture support. We explicitly support nVidia GeForce 2 or better,
and ATI Radeon 8500 or better.

If you own a supported card and continue to receive this message, try
updating to the latest video card drivers. Otherwise look in the
secondlife.com support section or e-mail technical support

You can try to run Second Life, but it will probably crash or run
very slowly. Try anyway?
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Yes No
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I click "yes" and get this error:
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Error
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Second Life is unable to run because your video card drivers
are out of date or unsupported. Please make sure you have
the latest video card drivers installed.

If you continue to receive this message, contact customer service.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

The "troubleshoot" slider in Display Properties->Settings->Advanced is already maxxed out. I looked in DxDiag and saw that the chip type is indeed being reported as GeForce2, and it has 32MB of memory. I suspect that SL is not correctly identifying my hardware. Any suggestions?

The GeForce 2 chipset is pretty much the bare minimum you can use to run SL. Since this is (apparently) an intergrated video motherboard, one question comes to mind: How much system RAM do you have?

From my own personal experience and what I've read in these forums, SL runs comfortably on 1GB of system RAM. 512MB of system ram is playable, but it will be slow. 256 may give you a slideshow. Below 256, SL will be very slow.

Intergrated video tends to hamper performance in 3D games (or "platforms" if you prefer). If this computer is not a laptop, I'd recommend getting an actual video card and disabling the intergrated chipset. Your system will make better use of system ram if it has dedicated video RAM.

Thanks for your reply!

I have 1GB of system memory. I know that this integrated chipset is kind of wimpy for 3D games, but it's usually been sufficient for me, though I sometimes have to turn down the eyecandy. Although you say that I'll probably get some lousy performance from this card, I'd like to try it anyway. If I like playing SL, maybe that'll be enough for me to spring for a new card. In any case, is there a way to bypass this hardware check and try the game anyway? I mean, it's still a GeForce2...how bad could it be? =D

Thanks again!

GeForce2 is the bare minimum, but apparently since the upgrade to 1.7 that bar has unofficially been raised. I recomend you go out and buy a newer graphics card. GeForceFX's can be had fairly cheap now, but if you want something good that will last you longer I'd go for the GeForce 6600GT.