Video cards for SL

I am currently running on

Pentium IV 2.66 GHZ
1.0 GB RAM
NVIDA Ge Force 4 MX 440 128 MB

does anyone have recommendations on which video cards work best on SL?
TY

Well this is just a matter of opinion based on observasions: Avoid ATI cards. Seems like SL & ATI don't mix well. I have a nVidia GeForceFX 5500 256mb AGP right now, does me pretty good but this christmas I plan on upgrading my system to 3 gigs of DDR333 RAM (currently got 1 gig DDR266) and upgrading to a nVidia GeForce 6600GT 256mb AGP. I'd recomend the 6600GT since its a really good step up from budget cards like ours but not costly hardcore dual 7800GT's linked in SLI mode. Plus it'll last you a while before becoming totally obsolete.

Heh he....I got the system over 3 yrs ago and only thing I upgraded really is the RAM. I think it's preety good for a 3 yr old PC. Then again it wasn't cheap.

I've had the upgrade bug for a couple weeks now, and I 2nd Ron with the 6600GT. It's got AGP & PCI-e models to choose from and seems like an all around good card for the money. Should at least keep SL running smooth until you want to do a major system overhaul.

If you've got a power supply of 350W or more, I recommend the Nvidia Geforce 6800GT. They are hard to find lately, but their price has dropped substantially.

Been running both nVidia and ATI cards for a long time. SL run great on my big Mac Dual G5 with the ATI 9800 Pro Edition (256 VRAM). Also runs good on the Windows based laptop, with Pentium 4 (3.4Ghz) and the nVidia GForce FX card and 1Ghz RAM.

It is all about the overall configuration and combined resources of your system, up to and including the speed of your broadband connection.

More is always better when it comes to the resource hog, Second Life.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of AGP vs PCI-e?

AGP is more stable fair as i'm going tell ya, PCI-E haves to many disadvents in my book.
i'm Harcore AGP card use.

Where's more info about PCI-E being so unstable? When it first arrived that was likely, but it's been out for awhile now on the market.

You're all evil and I'm a hater of everyone!

(Just trying to drum up a reply, I want to test my mail sorting rules for SL forum replies )

Just a note to the original poster: the MX designation on nVidia cards should be read as not very high performance compared with most of the rest of the nVidia line.

Older computers (like yours) have an AGP slot for graphics cards. Most new computers have a PCI Express slot for graphic cards. You simply must have the correct model, otherwise you won't be able to insert the card into the puter.

Debating advantages or disadvantages of both has only meaning if you plan buy a whole new computer.

(And yes, the nforce 6600GT cards offer good price/performance ratio. Get the AGP version)

PCI-e is the new standard for video cards, this shouldnt be confused with PCI, most computers will have a combination of PCI slots and an AGP slots, where-as the newer option is PCI and PCI-e slots (either 1 or 2)

Why 2 pci-e slots? well because this allows you to add 2 graphics cards to your system and increase speed even further. Also the bus speed of a PCI-e card is much faster than that of a AGP card so when you are comparing two 8x cards the PCI-e is going to be much faster, 8x is the AGP but PCI-e also has the option of running 16x and in the very new motherboards coming out now there is the option to run 16x on both cards

I've not heard of pic-e being any less stable, if anythng this may be due to the new nature and early drivers, i will certainly be upgrading to one of these systems in the new year

Running a PCI-E GF6800 and love it, runs way faster than the AGP version!

orginal question : 6600gt / 6800gt cards (128-256mb), do just fine for SL, youll get better performance since MX is crud cards, and more bling bling options , but SL like your cpu to do most of the work

if youre using pci-e on SL do NOT tick "agp acceleration" youll get a huge drop in fps.

as for AGP being more stable then pcie?, wheres that comming from, could be true on the first generation maybe , cant see it now tho.

Sidenote, i have yet to see SL use more then 120mb vid ram even with the heaviest places in SL, why is that?, since the textures in view sure do eat alot more then that,

MX card to not support pixelshaders wich SL will use for rendering water when that comes (again),

Just got the 6600 512MB model. Yum!

Only 20 bucks more than the 256 version too.

I never seen SL use over 128mb vid ram ever, kinda odd since we have a option to set graphic card memory, but for some reason SL stops at 118mb ish use every time even at places i know has more then that in view -.- odd

texture console - ctrl-shift-3 - GL mem : xxx/xxx ,, to view

Went to a heavy sim loads of avatars, turn on 512 view distance, only thing that will skyrocket is memory use, wont cache more in vid card.

I haven't seen mine use over 64mb of my 256mb vid ram. Maybe thats something LL should look into, heavier caching of textures in video ram for videocards 128 and above.

I got a max of 113 but my average would likely be around 40 or so. Thing is, is it being limited or is there just not a lot of areas with greater than 128 megs showing? I have a 512 meg card and I have no way to test if it can actually use that much.

I've been watching this for a while in the various tests i've been doing to find texture problems, i've managed 135Mb in bound mem (which is the GL Mem in texture console) or 160MB in GL Mem in the statistics window, The GL Mem in stats window is i think the actual total amount of memory used, while the GL mem in texture console is memory used only for textures, so im only able to use a total of 160/256Mb

One thing to note is that if you drop your card to 128Mb setting in prefs you'll only loose about 15Mb of texture memory usage (when compared with 256Mb setting) i'm not sure about the 512Mb cards as i dont have one.

My tests have been conduced by setting the draw distance at 512M and visiting a busy area on the mainland with heavy textures, spinning my avatar round to load all possible geometry