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Recommended video card that supports fog, trees and grass


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My ASUS on-board video adapter handles SL well for the most part, reflected water and such - except when I visit a region with lots  of trees, jungle,  grass moving in the wind, and/or fog .  My frame rate then diminishes noticibly.

Can anyone recommend a not-too-expensive PCI express video card that can handle these features?  My budget is $200 Aust.   I just  dont want to spend  $400-$500 on a top of the line card and power supply only to find the improvement is marginal.

Thank you!

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Marc Chamerberlin wrote:

Can anyone recommend a not-too-expensive PCI express video card that can handle these features?

Not without more information.

  • What board would you be plugging this into?
  • What speed/version of PCI-E?
  • What's the speed of your FSB and/or RAM.
  • What's the current spec of your power supply?
  • Do you have PCI (6-pin or 8-pin) power available for larger cards?
  • Is the PC fitted in a full size tower or reduced (ITX or similar).form factor.
  • Are you using Intel or AMD for processing? At what speed?
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My apologies I shoudl have included that info.

I've resolved it by ...

 - updating intel on-board HD4000 drivers.  Improved framerate by about 10%

- using Firestorm viewer.  The framerate improvement was noting short of drastic.  SL Viwer - 10-20 FPS.   Firestorm, 35-50 FPS.

This is without shadows of course, but I can live without that.

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The performance of Second Life is a composite of all the parts of your computer. If your performance bottleneck is a component other than your video card, changing it won't have much effect.

You can examine what your computer is doing while running SL and figure out which companets can be upgraded for the most improvement. Programs like System Explorer (free), GPU-Z (free), and Resource Monitor (built-in Windows) will let you examine your computer's activity.

The difference between FS and the SL Viewer likely has to do with the viewer's graphical settings. FS uses a different set of default settings than the SL viewer does. I tweak the settings in both viewers and get very similar performance from both. However, FS lacks some of the latest viewer enahncements, so I find scene render times are significantly different even while frames rates are nearly the same. When shopping in-world the SL Viewer tends to texture thrash and the FS viewer doesn't, which is a big plus. I haven't used SL 3.7.12 enough to know if the thrashing has been fixed. They were having a problem finding the problem.

Video cards that best support SL are NVIDIA's. NVIDIA provides better OpenGL support than AMD/ATI.

To make you money go farther, check eBay. As people that want the latest and greatest upgrade they often sell their old cards on eBay. You can get some great deals.

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Glad you found some easy (and free) answers.

Just a note on framerates in general as I watch them more often than most. They can fluctuate within a sim with NO changes to the vista and no other avatars from day to day. Along with the viewer (I hadn't used the official viewer in years so had no idea about that (TY)), the changes in the server codes can make a huge difference. Sometimes things are better after a new roll out -- sometimes depressingly slow.

ATI cards (I have an old but still quite powerful one) are typically penalized (not necessarily purposefully but the devs have traditionally worked for or tested on Nvidia it seems). My $450 well rated ATI card preforms just a bit better than a Nvidia $200 entry level one for example. Happily most of the ATI bugs are now fixed.

To help when you are at a sim that is slow (aside from turning off shadows and DOF -- first things to do) --- turn down your draw distance. The viewer has less to draw and hence an easier time. Derendering avatars in a crowd (right click in FS and choose derender) will also cut down on things your viewer needs to draw.

These are all machinimatographer tricks  -- an area where framerates are of up importance.

 

 

 

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Thank you all for somegreat advice.

As an experiment, I bench tested SLV and Firestorm using my Intel HD 4000 on board adaptor on the same parcel that had some trees and fine grass.  Here is a summary of the settings in each...

Quality bar = between high and ultra

Advanced lighting on, but no shadows

No ambient occlusion

Draw distance:  FS 600m, SLV 512 m (this was the max from what I could see)

Hardware settings : Anisotropic Filtering on, Open Gl Vertex buffer on, Streamed VBO's on, Antialisaing disabled.

Results: FS has an acceptable 12 - 30 fps.  SLV couldn't even move, the screen wouldn't even refresh for me to see the FS meter change.

So to say that I'm pleased FS has saved me $200 on an NVIDIA video card is putting it mildly !  :)

 

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