Jo Hoggard

Pretty much the best you can do is lower the graphics options so everything is deactivated and start enabling one by one (or two by two) until you get the problem. Then just leave that particular option diabled or lowered. Sadly Intel pretty much sucks in the performance/driver quality department and doesn't put as much effort into fixing things as much as AMD/ATI or Nvidia do.

Yeah, that will bring you down to the minimum in most cases. Check you inventory, everything should be in there.

If you use Firefox, go to Options->Applications. scroll down until you see Second Life under the Content Type column. To the right of it select whichever client you prefer. In my case the official client was the default, once I changed it to Firestomr it has been working, no issues.

Good tips Moiselle. If I migt add, please do check that memory limit you mentioned. Usually this will be in the motherboard manual that should have come with your computer. Otherwise vendors usually make it very easy to find a pdf copy on their sites. If your computer really is limited to 2GB you hsould probably think about getting a new one. Now the good news about this is that performance on modern CPUs is phenomenal even on the lower end models. You don't really need the highest end model to get good performance in SL. This is especially true with the current crop of Intel chips. SL is tends to be very CPU intensive and to make things worse it is not very good at using multiple cores (last time I checked). It also doesn't seem to take advantage of dual card setups, in case you were wondering. If your computer is 4, 5, or 6 years old I think it would be wiser to put any money you were planning to use towards a new PC. Depending where you live you could take advantage of specials by buying last year's model instead of the newest one. Last bit of advice, never rely on embedded video cards. If you want the best performance/quality only a card from ATI or Nvidia will give it to you. Intel video is simply meh.

Do yourself a big favor and upgrade your ram. Check if you system can support more than 2GB, if it can go for 4GB. You will see a very nice improvement not only in SL but in your computer performance as a whole. RAM is pretty cheap these days. That alone will give more stability to the viewers since they won't be caching to and from the hard drive as much.

Audencio, go baack to the newer viewer and check if you had Shadows & Lighting turned on. With your system I would turn it off, along with no antialiasing, lower the physics settings, etc.. You should be able to get a performance boost from that. At what resolution are your running the game? You might not want to stick with v1 since it will go away and you will be back to square one.

Quick note, just my two cents, I have a laptop with an i7 but only a 535m. I can run SL at max res (1920x1080) no matter the settings BUT Shadows & Lighting. That setting in particular kills my performance. So you will want something stronger, a 560m at the very least. Plenty of memory too, not just system memory but dedicated video memory. Try to get 1.5GB or 2GB video ram if you can get away with it.

Correct me if I am wrong but clearing the cache would only help if you have corruption problems. Otherwise it will temporarily kill your performance as it has to download your inventory and all the things around you. I agree with the previous comment, once FIrestorm catches up to the new code it's performance with get better. In my case I have to turn off shadows, reduce the lights quality, and check off antialiasing. My performance then goes up quite a bit.

I have experienced the same thing when wearing multiple Alpha layers. Wear one and only one and you will be fine. It is a bug I believe. In my situation I had one for the shoes and one for the head (so teeth would show through). The head layer would mess us (not completely override) the feet alpha layer, causing the ugly Ruth feet syndrome. Once I removed the head layer, it all was fixed.

You can do a couple of tests: disable Light & Shadows in the properties menu and/or run the other viewers to find out if you experience the same situation. If you do it might be the reported bug where meshes with alpha channel enabled textures do not get rendered properly when Lights and Shadows are enabled in the options. You can also try the Phoenix team forums for users using the Phoenix viewer that might be experiencing issues similar to yours.

Will $209 be ok? Nvidia 560GTX superclocked: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125390 ATI 6870: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102955 Both of them are pretty good cards that, bare Ambient Occlusion and maybe heavy shadows, will serve you well. And if you like the Batman game I would go for the Nvidia but I think both cards are fairly close in performance. $20 over: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125401 Basically anything GTX 560 and GTX560 Ti will be close to the range you want.The TI version is a better, revised spec. Things you should watch out for are the gpu speed. If price is close go for the faster one always unless it is like a 10-20MHz jump, then it is not worth to pay more money for it. Also watch the bus. A 256bit bus will always be better than 128bit. The memory type on the card also makes a difference, you should always look for GDDR5. Maybe someone else can elaborate on the AMD/ATI camp, I am not familiar with the latest but they should be very close in performance. Check reviews before deciding though! I haven't bought anything from those companies in a while but it is hard to go bad since they all get their components from the same suppliers most of the time.

Your PC is fine. If anything I would get 8GB instead of 4GB of main system memory. The 560Ti is the good version and should be fine depending on your display resolution. Shadows and Ambient Occlusion can be quite demanding at times so don't be surprised by some lag now and again. Your internet connection is as much a factor too since you are downloading data whenever porting to a new zone or when people come into range. SL is not really optimized for SLI nor multicore processors yet (last time I checked and from what I can see on my meters) so you don't really have to do much on that side of things.