What viewer for my AMD Radeon HD 5450 ??

[buttbadger Mirabeau]

Hi people.

I used to have a very old geforce for SL with 512Mb of GPU ram. My PC got issues making run sl without lag. So I decided to change it for something bigger and since i'm not rich, i found a cheap AMD Radeon HD 5450 with 2Gb of GPU ram.

It started well first, but now, after some time (a couple of hours usually), the viewer crashes, sometimes with similar behaviour, depending of the viewer.. Here's the viewers i tried

• Firestorm: Says at the bottom right that there's insufficient memory for textures and makes some stuff in gray. sometimes it finally crashes with no message
• Official SL viewer: crashes after some time with no message
• Kokua: Same thing
• Singularity: same thing
• Black dragon: Crashes with the message "blackdragon.exe stopped working" and looks for problems

I'm under windows 7 and my graphic card uses the latest official drivers. i'm about to try with ukando and dolphin.

Does someone else here uses this graphic card? What would be the best viewer for this one? Is there other better drivers for it?

Thanks for your help

[Coby Foden]

Unfortunately when looking at the benchmarks for that card it is very obvious that it is very low performance card. You certainly need something faster for nicer and smoother Second Life experience.

[buttbadger Mirabeau]

I'm thinking of changing for a nvidia card with similar performances.

Is a geforce GT610 or 630 would do the thing? I don't mind if my fps is less than 20, i just want sl to randomly crash now

[Coby Foden]

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buttbadger Mirabeau wrote:

I'm thinking of changing for a nvidia card with similar performances.

Is a geforce GT610 or 630 would do the thing? I don't mind if my fps is less than 20, i just want sl to randomly crash now

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Hmm... I have a feeling that those cards would not make much difference compared to what you have now.

For reference I have NVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti and it gives pretty decent and smooth experience in most places in SL.

I can even use shadows which add a lot of realism to SL.

[buttbadger Mirabeau]

I'm not looking for something different, i'm looking for somethign that would stop crashing.

My actual ATI has enough performances while waiting for something better (and for better, i mean a whole new pc)... but because it's ati, it crashes all the time (my old 512Mb nvidia never crashed that way on me) So similar performances is good enough for me. Plus, my budget doesn't permits me to spend more than 60€ for a new card (i lost 40€ in the ATI one, i'll never get them back again, sadly)

[Chic Aeon]

I compared your card to mine and see there is a BIG difference  . 

http://www.hwcompare.com/6125/radeon-hd-5450-vs-radeon-hd-6950/

If you can't run Singularity, it is unlikely that you can run any viewer well. That's the not so good news. Turning down your graphics settings will probably help. And if you can stay on for two hours without crashing then that's not bad.

Meanwhile the site above will let you compare performances of cards so maybe you can find something in your budget that will do better. Nvidia has always been the card SL is designed for. ATI cards have always had issues with SL -- many less than in the past now thankfully.

 

 

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

that card is in fact adequate to run Second Life without crashes. what edition of Windows 7 is this? is it 32 or 64 bit? and how much main memory is installed?

 

[Crim Mip]

If you're getting a couple hours between crashes, you're not doing badly. Just so you know, all the viewers have that texture discarded problem when they allocate more memory for textures than the system has. Firestorm just shows you when it happens. It's usually best to restart the viewer when you first see that because a crash is going to happen once it does and textures won't load right either. You might try turning your texture memory slider down to like 384. That will help lower the frequency of crashes. If you notice you crash really soon after restarting, it's possible you have a badly corrupted texture and can possibly get some benefit from clearing the cache. (only do that as a final resort though since it'll slow down your viewer as it recreates the texture cache)

That 5450 isn't a very fast video card. If you upgrade it, I'd go with something NVidia and at least a Gforce 6 series. I just upgraded to a GTX 650 and can actually use all the shiny new features and get decent frame rates as long as shadows are off or only sun and moon. with atmospherics offf, framerate is capping (45 is the best you can get in real frame rate). Nvidia's Open GL drivers are better which seems to mean slightly lower tier Nvidia give similar persormance in SL to slightly higher tier ATI. For anything using DirectX, there's really no clear advantage to either.