NVIDIA GEFORCE GT 220M DEDICATED GRAPHICS CARD (1GB) did I mess up????

[Bex Fallen]

 

Im a little concerned that I may have wasted a large amount of money, and am hoping someone can help me.  I bought a new laptop today, the spec exceeds the recommended system requirements ( briefly: 2.8 GHz Intel core duoT9600 processor, nvidia geforce GT 220m graphics card VRAM 1gb dedicated, OS windows vistapremium 32 bit, )  Anyway to the point..I installed the newest version of phoenix viewer the same version that I have running on a much lower spec system but for some reason it popped up with a msg telling me that my system doesn't reach the minimum req specs to use phoenix...kinda odd as its better than my old machine...So basically im wondering if anyone knows if my graphics card isn't compatible....my avatar sure looked weird kinda orange and bald uh oh!  thanx in advance Bex

[WeeWillian Wylie]

Probably best to go to the Phoenix support page and ask them...In world people you can talk to are listed here... http://www.phoenixviewer.com/support.php ...Phoenix Viewer is a sperate viewer from Linden Labs.

                      

[shadowfamicom Watanabe]

Sometimes this message can appear because either.

1. Graphics Drivers are not installed or up to date.

2. Obsecure or very recent graphics cards that do not fall under the "accepted cards" even though they should play SL just fine.

3. Specs are indeed too low.

 

Place to download drivers for your exact card

http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win7-winvista-266.58-whql-driver.html

 

[Thibaud Merlin]

Imho your new laptop is quite OK. The problem is that the the device list which is read when starting the viewer is quite old and does not include recent graphic processors. I suggest you modify the target in the desktop shortcut to add the parameter --noprobe. This would skip the hardware detection step. To give you an example, the target for my Phoenix shortcut reads :

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Phoenix Viewer\PhoenixViewer.exe" --settings settings_phoenix.xml --noprobe

I hope this solves your problem.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Your 220M will work with SL.  It's not a particularly high performance video card though.  The way nVidia numbers their cards tells you the series (or generation) of the card with the first number and the performance level within the series with the second and third numbers.  As it stands right now nVidia's newest generation is the 500 series (unless they recently introduced a newer series that I haven't read about)........your card is 3 generations old.  That generation came out a little over a year ago.  The second number is the more important number since it tells you the performance of the card.  Yours is 2..........or second lowest in the 200 series.  It will work but not that well......probably the best graphics settings you could set in preferences without lag or crashing issues would be mid range.  Even then you'll probably have slow rezzing if you are in a normally primmed and textured area.  If you set your draw distance to about 96 meters and reduce your particles it would help but the card is just not powerful enough to give good graphics performance in a program like SL.

 

I'm a little confused about your message.  When you get the message, can you "OK" out of it and still log in?  If so then there should be a little box to check to "Don't show this again" so you don't get the pop up every time you log in.  If you can't log in at all using Phoenix then you should probably check with Phoenix support.  Or you can try another viewer.  The SL viewer 1.23 can still be downloaded on the download page.  I know Imprudence works with an Intel chipset so you might try that too.  Viewer 2 may not work, but you can try it too.

 

And you need to check for a more recent driver too.  Don't go to Windows or you computer manufacturer.........go to nVidia's driver site instead.

 

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

[JordiSunshine Takacs]

Thanks re nvidia card numbers. Drives me crazy how anyone is supposed to tell one from another.

[Medhue Simoni]

I have purchased about 6 different computers for SL over the years, 4 in the last year and a half. They all have different video cards. A couple of them are real beefy, and all of them got them same warning message.

Check your Nvidia Control Panel. There are lots of different settings you can play with. Also, the last time I got a new video card, none of the drivers worked until I got the driver directly from Nvidia's website.

[Medhue Simoni]

Yes, thanks for the number info stuff. That was very interesting. I mean i kinda have some experience with them and I know what are the best cards, but I had no idea what all the numbers meant.

 

A year ago, i got the 210 for a back up pc, and It handled alot better than you are claiming for the 220. I'm sure you are probably guessing tho. I could actually see shadows in SL, but only at around 10 fps. The pc the card was in is a quad core and has 8 gigs of ram tho. I never tried it in the Pheonix viewer. I kinda liked the card tho, and it performed as I needed it, but I have moved on as now I have a 450 in that pc.

[Medhue Simoni]

Oh, but you guys are talking about a laptop. Sorry, you are probably right then.

[Oddball Otoole]

I have a 210 in my laptop, works like a charm.