Video Card Support...

A feature I'd like to see is for this 3D game use the 3D accelerator in my computer which was quite costly. The video card is an ATI X800XT. I know ATI isn't a big name and not many people have their cards (NOTE: sarcasm), but support for them would be nice regardless.

This game is graphically very simple (compared to recent releases) but runs horribly. Personally I'm used to cranking settings up from the default, not down all the way.

Reassurance that someone is actually doing something about this and not just adding on more ways to play with the camera would be nice.

Disillusion, what's the rest of your computer like? Particularly CPU and RAM? All the links in the chain considered... and the strength of your Internet connection? SL does make use of 3D graphics acceleration but it's bound to many things.

Unlike a typical "game" with lots of preoptimization, where you can have a slower CPU with a fast graphics card, it's desired to have a powerful CPU and graphics card with SL's online world. A keyword here is "flexibility", because that's what's so unique in SL. Things'll be slower because you can change so much of the environment on the fly. There's a lot that's needed to be calculated "live", and any weak link in the chain is like a pipeline with a hole in it.

Some things like Ripple Water (new in 1. make good use of your graphics card, altho other faves of mine like Local Lighting are still quite CPU-bound... so I do hope for more GPU-accelerated features too.

Do know that FPS gains are a priority tho--several recent releases have incrementally focused on improving it! And I could always use more myself!

I wrote recently about my experiences to give more context.

Yeah I realize that Torley. I've got an athlon 64 3400+, a gig of ram, my HDs are on a SATA striped RAID, its not an ancient box with a newer vid card in it that i'm talking about here, and also most of the "optimization" tips i've read on the forums from users involves getting a GeForce card, not really an option.

And seriously this game does work better on an athlon xp 1700 with a geforce 4 ultra (much slower system). (Also note that I have friends, also with new systems and ATI cards that have the exact problems.)

Interstingly enough.. I actually noticed something along this line this morning myself. I usually only play Second Life on my home gaming PC. This morning.. I actually booted up my brand new laptop and played second life. Let me list the specs of both machines here:

Home Gaming PC:
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
1 Gig of DDR 400 Ram
GeForce 6600 256 mb vid card.

Laptop:
Pentium 4 3.0Ghz
1 Gig of DDR 400 Ram.
ATI X600 256 mb vid card.

What I found interesting.. is that on my laptop this morning.. the game was actually having "graphical" lag. When I panned around.. there was a noticeable hang that was occuring. While on my home gaming PC.. everything runs perfectly smooth. Given.. the hang was not "horribly" bad.. but it is there. I imagine it would be even more noticeable on a PC with less Ram or a slower processor.

NVidia cards have always had EXCELLENT OpenGL support, while ATI cards tend to focus on DirectX. Since Macs don't get DirectX (because it's an M$ branded piece of silliness) they require high performance OpenGL cards, and NVidia have always been better for that.

Althought ATI do clock in reasonably at OpenGL, I think that they perform better at certain aspects. Don't ask me what though, I'm not that technically into the whole rendering business, just have bits and pieces of information =)

My comp handles the graphics perfectly, with most slow-down occurring with my internet connection rather than anything else. Although the Mac client does seem to have random slow-downs, but I can't pinpoint what is causing those =(

i am running a old machine with a newer video card in it (amd xp 2200+ 1.5gb ram GF6600GT) and i hit a new FPS record for my machine today in a skybox, clocking in at 79.5fps (wooter) anyway on to my point

i have a old powermac 8500 with a crapload of upgrades, it barley meets SL mac requirements, but im not here to complain that my 11 year old mac doesnt play SL what i am here to say is... it has a ATI radeon 8000 series pci video card, just out of sadistic intrest i wanted to see if SL would even start on the bugger.. with the ATI card nope nada forget it, wont even load the slpash screen. I take the same computer and slap a (bios hacked) Geforce 2 MX in it and bam SL loads and runs (like total Shi+, but hey its a OLD computer)

so whats the deal, that ATI runs OpenGL apps just fine on the mac, but not SL, but yet the older weaker GF2MX (that i littarly pulled out of a dumpster) could run SL

Yes i know ATI is funny about the way it handles OGL but still theres something not quite right

Were you running the Mac version with both cards, or was this SL running on an old Mac and an old PC? If the latter, then I wouldn't compare the Mac and Windows versions of SL really, as the Mac version is still less than perfect unfortunately, quite juttery at times, experiencing video lag that it has no right to suffer on a NVidia 6800 Ultra (256mb) which is an OpenGL monster of a card.

An it's also possible that it could be the processor in the Mac, as SL may require a native OS X chip, and you've presumably stuck a G3 or G4 processor in it? Upgrade cards don't run certain kinds of apps on Mac OS X so it could be that coming into play.

If both cards were in the Mac then I'd say it was the drivers of the ATI, could be a little used feature that NVidia put into the GeForce 2 that ATI didn't and which has become popular with newer cards. Could be anything really, ATI cards back then were best used with the Rave rendering engine (which IMO was smoother running than both DirectX and OpenGL, just didn't have all the bells and whistles, would have been enough for SL though if any cards still supported it).

Its been very hard for them to develop for ati cards, mainly because ati have written a driver for themselves, this is very optimised but provides for very little debugging functionality, while the nvidia cards simply use the opengl implementation of the driver which allows the developers more access to debugging information

both were running on the old mac, with PCI cards and the ati card is less than 2 years old

its ok tho i have my pc to play SL on, just making an observation

I'm really digging SL but can only play it at work (which will eventually spell trouble for me.) Can someone recommend a laptop that is under $700? I might be dreaming but my old Win98 system just won't cut it at home.

Many thanks.

heres a decent compaq, its got a dinky hard disk at this price and the video could be more powerfull and the video memory is shared with the system memory (bleh, slow) ... after i told it to put 2 512mb memory sitcks in it (1 gb total) it rang up at 754us$

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_series.do?storeName=computer_store&category=notebooks/compaq_presario&series_name=V2000Z_series&catLevel=2&tab_switch=true&tab=specs

alternitively for 999us$ this is basicly the same thing but with a pretty darn nice 128mb ATI 9700 (much more video power) its also got a better CPU
http://ibuypower.com/ibp/store/configurator.aspx?mid=126

just to put them on the same level the compaq with 512mb of memory (which i wouldnt suggest since the video card is going to leech atleast 1/4 of that) with the weaker video card and budget cpu came up to 679us$ course you probally can get it with just the basic memory at the base price, name brands are really good at dubbling the cost of ram

ALSO heres another compaq thats basicly the same as above, but with a smaller screen and weighs more (but its only 499 basic price)
http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_series.do?storeName=computer_store&category=notebooks/compaq_presario&series_name=M2000Z_series&catLevel=2&tab_switch=true&tab=specs

course all of these have ATI video cards, it seems if you want mobile NVidia your automaticly in the 1200+ $ range consider a tower, for 550 bucks (no monitor) you can get a pretty stacked tower off of ibuypower.com