Bought a great graphics card, no joy.

Hi All,

I bought a BFG GeForce 7800 GT card, PCI Express. I still get an error every time I start Second Life. It says that I should select AGP acceleration, even though it's already selected. I don't think I'm tapping the abilities of this card with the game... Any help?

I have a pretty recent NVidia driver loaded (81.95) - I see that there's a 81.98 version, which I'm trying now... could that be my problem?

- Thanx
- Jon Senior

Ok, the latest drivers don't help either...

Any help?

- Thanx in advance!
- Jon

It's possible that SL is misreading PCIe as PCI, which of course won't be able to use AGP features. If you ignore the error, does it actually work in world, or is it slow and clunky?

Yes, it works, but it doesn't seem very fast. I've never seen it on other PCs, so it's hard for me to know what's fast or slow. I don't have a lot of the video features turned on. Is there a way to identify what SL thinks is going on (in terms of the graphics card) once you are in the game? I mean, can I tell if SL thinks I have AGP vs. PCIe?

Any other diagnosing I can do?

- Thanx
- Jon

I was able to see these stats in the "about" box:

http://static.flickr.com/48/131494601_82892d8843_o.jpg

That help?

- Jon

Doesn't tell me a lot... the real information is from the in-game stats ... (accessed with ctrl-shift-1 I think) which will tell you frame rates, and much other useful stuff.

It does seem to be recognising the card, but not sure about PCI-e. Since I've never used a PCI-e card myself, I can't be certain what it should say. In any case, frame rates in SL can be very slow sometimes. The best I ever had was with a PCI GeForce 2MX (no suffix) with 64Mb VRAM back in 1.0 ... though I now have 8xAGP and 256MB of VRAM I still never get above 7fps.

Ok, how does this look?

http://static.flickr.com/48/131494601_82892d8843_o.jpg

- Jon

Almost 17FPS in a sim of 22 people and 32 who can see it, not bad at all Jon! Also you got an awesome ping, I think you will be allright with preformance, and welcome to SL.

It depends where you are, but to me, 16fps looks reasonable for SL, and certainly well above what a normal PCI card could get today... so I'd suggest it IS working properly, though you may need to tweak some things, either in SL or in windows for better performance.

I noticed someone else in another thread has the same card, and you asked there... maybe some more solid help will come of that. Good luck

Ok, cool y'all.

One more, in case you can see something more...

http://static.flickr.com/55/131500780_4985660cdf_o.jpg

- Jon

It depends where you are, but to me, 16fps looks reasonable for SL, and certainly well above what a normal PCI card could get today... so I'd suggest it IS working properly, though you may need to tweak some things, either in SL or in windows for better performance.

I noticed someone else in another thread has the same card, and you asked there... maybe some more solid help will come of that. Good luck

15-25 fps pretty normal for SL, you can get it higher/lower , just go in a crowded sim or empty one.

I gotten that error with agp to, was a driver to read temperature on my vid card that was the cause for me, but enabling agp drops performance alot for me for some reason (pci-e)

Jon, when I first ran SL after moving to PCI-E, I got that same error. I checked the box, and never saw it again. You are not the first person I have heard from on the forums, however, who's SL always warns about AGP Acceleration on startup.

Is the "detect hardware on startup" option checked? If it is, that's why it keeps warning you. Also, I seem to remember dealing with constant crashes on quit on my other computer with 1.9, so maybe your preferences aren't getting saved?

I just built a new computer with an nvidia 6800GS in it, and I get at least 32fps in my private sim (nearly 6000 objects, 128 draw distance, 5-10 avatars at a time, everything but anisotropic and local lighting on). Do you have local lighting on? What's your draw distance? Just list out your graphics and advanced graphics preferences. Local lighting sucks up a lot more resources than it should, and I don't think I've ever heard of a machine that can actually handle it well. Wait for that until 1.9.1 hits the grid with hardware lighting.

Anyway, you should be able to get at least what I'm getting, assuming your processor is comparable to my amd 3700+, considering you shelled out $300+ for a 7800 card What's your screen resolution?

I would expect at least 25fps in general usage, but then again, I haven't yet really wandered the grid much with this new computer. In many ways, SL can be much more intensive than something like, say, half-life 2, because it's doing so much: downloading all of the objects in the world, figuring out their 3d representations, downloading textures, decoding them, etc. SL makes somewhat inefficient use of triangles because of how objects are made. You can't really expect it to hit 60fps in general usage, at least not yet. That said, your card should be able to do a bit better than that... but it depends on what else you have and what settings you've turned on.

I'll have to get my settings when I'm home tonight - I'm at work now...

I have my screen resolution set to 1920x1200...

- Jon

I see no one noted this, but AGP Acceleration is ONLY for AGP cards. If you're using anything else just disable it otherwise there's a good chance it will slow you down.

Thats not true. the way they are using AGP acceleration term, its a feature that works for PCIe too, and the option works fine on PCIe cards and does help improve performance.

When SL detects that your card isn't an AGP card, it says that if it's PCI-e, you should enable the AGP setting.