Getting friends on SL... The Intel GMA 950 Graphics

In my attempt to get more people to get on SecondLife, I have gotten a frequent response; that their graphics system is Intel's "Graphics Media Accelrator" 950.

I remember back in the 1.6-ish days, my friends with Intel based graphics would get garbled "rainbow" textures all over everything, and would crash often.

Does the GMA 950 work ok with SecondLife? And if so, does it work well with SecondLife?

Strangely enough, the GMA 950 is in a HUGE amount of deaktops and notebooks of today.

The 950 is a cheap low power integrated ( which means it uses system Ram not it's own dedicated ram ) graphics card system. As such, many non-gaming laptops use it.

Note NON-GAMING.. from a hardware PoV SL is 100% a game and as such needs gaming grade hardware.

You need to spend AT LEAST £800ish to get a gaming grade lap top, most people spend much less.

As such the simple answer is the 950 is unsupported in SL and whilst you might manage to force SL to work with it, you won't get good performance, in fact the performance will be very poor and you will be living on borrowed time.

In short - best to get a proper gaming system (I'm not talking high end, can get one at a push for £500-600).

Thanks for the reply; I'll just let my friends know to get retail laptops with either the Geforce Go 6100/6150 or the ATI XPress x200 or x1100/1150

Although not having dedicated memory, they do a much better job with 3D apps.

They do better but I'd still not reccomend them. Move up one more level ( about £100 I'd guess ) nd you'll have a much more long lived PC. Compromise on screen size, HDD DVD-RW - that sort of thing if you need to push the price down.

Dedicated is the word I think to look out for, for graphics memory.

Though honestly my snazzy new laptop gets rainbows in SL, but that could be a vista thing. I kept looking at cheap laptops but I knew it would bug me to not have the option to run various things because they can't do graphics. I'm glad I held out for something better. I see laptops starting at around £650 on sites that look like they'd do well.

That's "ripoff Britain" prices, so elsewhere is probably cheaper.

LOL...

When it comes to computer prices if anyting the UK is on the cheap side, we certainly aren't expensive.