Blurry textures or unplayability - Hell(p)?

OK, straight to the point

I'm trying to run SL on an AMD Sempron 3000+, 512 Mb RAM (DDR2) with NVidia GF 6600 (128 Mb). You'd think it's a decent computer to run SL - obviously it's not...

Adv. Graphics -> Setting graphics card memory to 128 Mb is a HELL to deal with. Using that setting makes SL completly and totally unplayable. Attempting to rotate the view, zoom in or otherwise move the camera stops SL for 1-2 minutes in a completly empty area and minimum settings on everything.

Setting the card memory to 64 Mb resolves that issue completly, FPS is stable at 15-20 even in a crowded area and setting at max, local lightning on, particles at 4096, draw at 128, no problem at all, just brilliant... NOT. Why? Because all textures on objects are a complete blur until I right-click the object or select it with the edit tool.

So here I am, chosing between playability and completly blurred out world vs complete unplayability. Anyone has any suggestions?

Well, a Sempron 3000+ is quite a nice processor - not the fastest machine in the world, but enough to run SL

512Mb RAM - well, winxp on my system will use close to 300Mb when I boot, and SL uses over 700Mb when I am playing, which comes to a hell of a lot more than 512Mb. I tried once to play on a PC with 512Mb, I gave up. I noticed a MASSIVE difference when I upgraded this PC from 1Gb to 2Gb in the performance of SL.

64Mb graphics memory isn't enough to cache all the textures (as you are seeing), 128Mb isn't enough, either. I have 128 and while I am playing I consistently see some textures de-rez as it rezzes in others that it thinks are more important.

However, if you take it up to 128Mb, then it will use more system memory too, to track what it has and what it is doing with them. This means that you'll start to swap more, which will hammer performance, and cause stalling, stuttering slow play, which is what you are seeing.

The cure?

1) get more system ram. 1Gb is just enough, 2Gb is nice

2) get a graphics card with 256Mb or more graphics ram - I wish I could follow this piece of advice myself, I'm saving up as we speak.

good luck