No Shiny Water Or Vertex Option With Brand New Video Card

What's going on in SL where a brand new video card doesn't have Ripple water option, and avatar vertex program options?
I didn't notice for a few weeks, cause I'm usually building 700 m up and not looking at the water.

Not only that, I have no option to enable Bump Map and clothing
Same thing in Windlight, but worse...


I just got the Nvidia 8800 GT, which is currently about a month old, newer then the 8800 GTX and GTS.

Why can I not have these features? What can be done so I can enable the features?
I specifically got a newer video card so I be more productive and have more eye candy NOT less.

Is any Linden even looking at these forums posts to begin with?

Take a look at /333/6b/227074/1.html for people with the same problems.

The short answer is "no, they don't". You'll occasionally see a Linden speak up, but it's rare and in a lot of cases it's probably because someone referred said Linden to that thread.

New Nvidia Drivers out today DEC 11, 2007 !

Not sure if they fix the problems, can't test at the moment as SL is down for maintenance.
But It's probably gonna be recommended that everyone update anyhow, so theres the link.
As soon as I test it ill repost.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_169.21.html

no dice..

new drivers don't help.

Maybe get an 8800GTS?

You know, it's been working this way for 25 years. You purchase new hardware, winblows doesn't have the drivers for it, purchase new operating system, much doesn't work for months. That or the drivers are flaky and a tad bit on the unstable side.

I quit purchasing the absolute latest. When I do purchase hardware, I purchase something that has been around for just a bit. A few driver, bios, etc.. updates. I have the 8800GTS, frame rates are excellent. Especially in Linux. In XP, the functions in WL do work with this card.

Why always purchase the latest when, especially with video, the drivers always seem, and have always seemed a more long term goal for the hardware manufacturers? Look at ATI, takes many months to get something that just works.

Latest greatest for the manufacturer is just not at all the latest and greatest for the end user much of the time. Not when your waiting for months for a solid and stable driver to appear. By that time, a new latest greatest emerges and the hardware you now have finally works. I was blown away with the 8800GTS coming from a 5 year old ATI pro. Simply put, SL certainly isn't a platform/game as some call it, that requires the latest of hardware.

Might consider an alternate method in purchasing ideas maybe?
Just a thought. It's certainly tamed many of my previous more youthful rants and rages.

--Tracy

I am running ver 158.27 on a 8800 GTX with no problems as far as I can tell. I haven’t tried Windlight however but the “enable ripple water” and “avatar vertex” works fine using this version. From what I can tell 158.27 works for all Gforce series, you can get a lot of the older drivers at guru3d.com on the download page. I can’t vouch for any of the drivers provided on this site however. 9 times out of 10 when you buy a new card, the install disk is going to have old drivers on it. This was my case, it had 158.27 on it. I tried 163.75 and 169.21 both had issues with ripple water and vertex. I fully uninstalled and put 158.27 back on.

Hope this might help someone.

DoC