GeForce gtx 660 - Asus gtx 970 Strix

[Anthony Hollow]

Hello everybody!

My current pc specs are

GPU- GeForce gtx 660

CPU- AMD 4100 Quad-core Processor

Memory- 8GB of Performance Ram

Operating System- Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium

 

I just bought a Asus gtx 970 Strix Video card, And I was just wondering if I can run Second Life on Ultra Settings with this new Video card? Or at least set it inbetween High-Ultra and be able to have Full Shadows, Water reflections and Point lighting on full settings? If i can, What should I expect to get for average FPS? Also if anybody in the Forums has the Asus gtx 970 Strix video card, How do you like it? 

Thanks in advance to all that respond/ Reply to my question! :D

You can always reach me In-World as well! 

Anthony Hollow

 

[bigmoe Whitfield]

my old system is simular to that and even with 8gb of ram and the 980.  it was still having issues.  even my new one because of how unoptimized sl is,  still lags.  

 

fps, maybe 30 in crowds (optimistic)  outside of that.  depending where you are.  can get as high as 370.

 

but remember too,  if your system is maxed out ram/cpu then it's going to bottle neck, people blame sl for the lag they expereince. while being unoptimized does not help the issue,  the biggest culprit is people's old hardware unable to handle the data thrown at it. basically the buses/bandwidth on the mobo is getting bottlenecked and cant move the information as fast as needed.

 

so keep that in mind too.

[Qie Niangao]

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Anthony Hollow wrote:

 

I just bought a Asus gtx 970 Strix Video card, And I was just wondering if I can run Second Life on Ultra Settings with this new Video card? Or at least set it inbetween High-Ultra and be able to have Full Shadows, Water reflections and Point lighting on full settings? 

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I run SL that way with your old 660 and a roughly comparable machine. Except for photo shoots, I keep draw distance at 96m (I'm mostly on Mainland, so longer draw is ugly), turn off anti-aliasing altogether (really, at 1080p from a sensible viewing distance, which is worse, invisible jaggies or invisible smear?), and sometimes anisotropic filtering, but otherwise everything maxed-out.

For those coming from a videogame background, though, shooting machinima, and/or playing shoot-em-up games in SL, the ol' 660 isn't adequate -- which presumably is good news for you, given that you've got a fancy new card that should run circles around the old one.

[Snickers Snook]

I just went through similar angst as you over getting a new video card but the card I was replacing was even older, a GTX 460. And at the same time, I also moved from an AMD to an Intel cpu. So I did a bunch of research and bugged friends in SL and RL about all this.

My first mistake was buying a 4GB Radeon R7 370 because it "benchmarked" well and people told me AMD drivers were better in SL now. OMG that thing was slower in SL than my old 460. So back to the store the card went. And I started doing more research (I'm on a budget and can't just throw money at stuff).

My second card and the one I'm now using is a 4GB GTX 960 SC so one step below your 970 but if yours is only 2GB, mine may be a little better and handling memory intensive stuff. Anyway, your card is fine.

BUT, it's the rest of the system that may slow you down. Before I started to look for a new video card, I actually switched from an AMD 4300 FX (one up from yours) to an Intel i3 based system. OMG, right off I probably doubled my FPS over the AMD even though the i3 is hardly a powerhouse. But according to things I read, Intel does a much better job with two really efficient cores than AMD does with 4, 6 or even 8 inefficient ones. Plus SL apparently only uses 2 cores max anyway.You also may be using an older motherboard that's only PCI 2.0 x16 for the card which can be a small bottleneck.

Next you could probably benefit from more RAM. I got a bit more speed in SL when I went from 16 to 32 gb (I do Photoshop) and I would think you would benefit in improving from 8gb.

And lastly, when I got my new 960, Firestorm went from maybe 25 FPS to 50+ on average. Interestingly, I saw little improvement in FPS with Cool VL Viewer. It went from about 30 - 32 FPS to maybe 35 FPS. The developer responded that it was probably due to Firestorm being 64-bits and optimized for my 64-it windows and drivers vs. Cool VL Viewer which is 32-bits and optimized for older hardware.

Anyway that's my ten cents. I'm no expert but I think I learned from my own similar search.