Wow... WTF?

I wasn't sure whether to post this to Technical Issues or what, but this has to be said... it's just too weird o.O

I've played SL on LOTS of different (PC) computers... everything from Athlon XP to p-4 to Athlon64, on speeds from 1.6ghz, to 2.5 ghz, on lots of different grade video cards, from ATI 9250 128 to onboard Geforce 6100 256, with lots of different memory types, from 512 DDR PC2700 to 2GB DDR 400, of course, with lots of different results with performance.

Well, my SO and I tend to argue over who gets the main computer (not the fastest, but with a better video card than our faster-processor laptop), so just to see what I could get for a second desktop, I finally just put together an old computer with the following specs:

Motherboard: Donno.. old dell one with an intel chipset
Processor: 1ghz PIII (yes, One GigaHertz)
Memory: 512MB PC133 SDRAM
Video Card: GeForce 5200 256MB PCI (Not AGP, Not PCI express - PCI)

I just got everything installed, and fired up Second Life...

It runs better than ANY computer I have run it on to date. Any. Even better than the 2.4 ghz P-4 with a GeForce 6800 PCI-Express (I think that was the specs anyway)... though that one actually didn't run as well as the AMD64 2.0 ghz with an onboard 256MB GeForce 6100 and 1GB DDR400, so I'm not surprised.

But still! WTF?! HOW can this be possible? I mean, I've even turned *everything* on, and the only noticeable slow-down is the Anisotropic Filtering thing. It's even letting me turn on AGP, and I don't *have* AGP. Even weirder - it's reporting slower fps than any of the computers I've tried - almost as low as the laptop usually does, but it's obviously way smoother than any of them. I get none of the jerkyness I've gotten on every other system I've tried, none of the taking a million years for everything to rez, nothing. Was the PIII really just that much better than anything then or now (I was a big fan of the pIII, but only because the k6/2 didn't come in anything above 550mhz)? Is the GeForce 5200 just a superior card? What?

When my 6800 fried last year I was stuck on my server with a Geforce 3 Ti200, the FPS were around the same but it didn't look as good, and yes, I had the same reaction as you lol. I dont think it uses the latest OpenGL, you can check under About then Secondlife to see what version it is using, I think this has to do with the FPS and quality.