video cards

[Donmcybertect]

I have a Dell 5600 series with dual xeons  running at 3.10  gigahertz and 64 gig of memory on each. I have an Nvidia 4000 graphics card.

I am planning on replacing the GPU as it's not highly recommended. I figure to spend about $100 on the card. I would like some recommendations.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

What I gather from the computer is it's a Dell Precision T5600 workstation with an Nvidia Quadro 4000 (10 year old Fermi card).

Now isn't a great time to be buying a graphics card on a budget. Prices are insane. For $100 new there's the Nvidia GT1030* and that's about it. You'll really want an Nvidia GTX card, and I don't think $100 is going to touch one new. The 1030 is better than what you have, but is probably going to leave you wanting more.

In the used range of things I think you could reasonably expect to find for $100, your best bet is probably a GTX 1050ti or 1050 (ti is better). Look out for fake cards. Crooks are reflashing old GTS 450 cards and selling them as modern GTX cards. Do not buy any Nvidia card with a VGA connector on it. No legitimate Nvidia card you would want to run SL on has one.

You might be able to find a used GTX 970 or 980 in your budget. They're getting old but are still very capable and are probably a good match for your CPUs.

(* ETA: the GGR5 version of the GT1030, not the DDR4 version, I keep forgetting there are two).

Edited December 28, 2020 by Lyssa Greymoon

[Wulfie Reanimator]

If you're on Firestorm, go to "Help > About Firestorm" in the top menus, and copypaste it here.

The specs you've given are not very specific and kind of confusing. I can't tell if you're using an office toaster or a supercomputer.

Edited December 27, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Fritigern Gothly]

16 minutes ago, Lyssa Greymoon said:

You might be able to find a used GTX 970 or 980 in your budget. They're getting old but are still very capable and are probably a good match for your CPUs.

I would like to add that the GTX 660 that I have seems to perform better than a gtx 1030 according to videocardbenchmark.net.
My card if sufficient for SL though, even though I often get frame rate drops when there are many avatars around.
  

Click image to enlarge.

[Lindal Kidd]

If your budget is $100, just keep the Quadro 4000.

[Nalates Urriah]

Your first step is to find out what cards are available and at what prices. I just found a the GTX-1060 w/6GB DDR5 for US$60. Do a google search. These prices change by the day. Don't be discouraged. Get on eBay and search to see what is out there. If a card is being auctioned you can often get an awesome deal. People with GTX-20## cards are upgrading.

The NVIDIA GTX-3070 is out. Sells for about US$500. That new card will push the price of other cards, 2070 & 1070, down. 

The 2060 and 3060 are newer cards with the 30## series being the newest. These new 20 and 30 series cards provide features that SL does not use. Even the 1060 has more capability then SL can use. For now I wouldn't spend money on a 20 or 30 series unless I played games other than SL.

Once you find a card that fits your budget compare performance of your current card and your target card. Decide if the likely improvement is worth the money.

Be warned that SL is usually not GPU bottlenecked. Get GPU-Z (free) and see where you computer is choking. If the GPU load is below 50%... you probably won't see much of a performance gain with a new video card. You probably should look at upgrading other parts of the computer. My 1060 seldom runs over 25% GPU load. Even running two viewers it only bumps 50%.

Launch the Windows Resource Monitor. Let it run in background as you run SL. Every so often flip over and see what the stats are. Look at memory to see if you are page faulting. If so, more memory will make a huge difference. With 64GB of RAM you shouldn't be. Watch the disk drive load. If it is high or bumping 100% for any extended time, look to see what is using the drive. Eliminate it and you should see faster scene renders.

You could use 16GB of RAM for a Ram-Drive and put the viewer's cache on the ram drive. Using the new RC Viewer with the new cache and a RAM drive makes for a very fast scene render. That will leave you 48GB to run SL and it should NOT page fault. With 16GB of ram it shouldn't page fault. But, check.

Watch your CPU load. I would be surprised if you get to 50%. But SL viewers are most affected by CPU speed. While the viewer is multi-threaded the render engine runs pretty much in a single thread. Thus CPU speed is a significant factor in FPS. You may want to see if you can overclock and push it up to 4Ghz. That could give you more FPS than a new video card.

Memory is the next common bottleneck. You have plenty. But is it fast memory? Is it the fastest your motherboard can handle? You'll have to look up the MB specs. You can use CPU-Z (also free) to see which MB and which speed RAM you have installed without opening the case. Unfortunately memory always runs at the speed of the slowest memory stick. Normally we match all the memory sticks to avoid that problem.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

17 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

I would like to add that the GTX 660 that I have seems to perform better than a gtx 1030 according to videocardbenchmark.net.

Oh, definitely. I think almost every 600 series or later GTX card will outperform the GT 1030. The 1030's virtue is that it's available new and fits the OP's budget. If used is an acceptable option, then that's the way to go and the 1030 should be off the table.

[Gage Wirefly]

20 hours ago, Fritigern Gothly said:

I would like to add that the GTX 660 that I have seems to perform better than a gtx 1030 according to videocardbenchmark.net.
My card if sufficient for SL though, even though I often get frame rate drops when there are many avatars around.
  

Click image to enlarge.

That is true the 660 outperforms the 1030, but take a closer look at the numbers. The 1030 is a much newer highly more efficient part and its competing at only 30w with no external power-which menas it could literally be dropped into any off the shelf system with no fuss, providing it fits in there. 

Not the greatest , but that's pretty amazing for what it is.  As someone who has used  a 1030 in the recent past, it is not a bells and whistles gpu but it can do SL. I ran SL on mid settings with no ALM obviously and avatars turned way down, not the fastest experiences but it's not the worst either IMO.

Adding: I had the GDDR5 version, not the crappy DDR4 one- it was around 96 bucks purchased new.

Edited December 28, 2020 by Gage Wirefly

[Donmcybertect]

On 12/27/2020 at 5:41 PM, Wulfie Reanimator said:

If you're on Firestorm, go to "Help > About Firestorm" in the top menus, and copypaste it here.

The specs you've given are not very specific and kind of confusing. I can't tell if you're using an office toaster or a supercomputer.

Firestorm 6.3.2 (58052) Sep 27 2019 22:41:52 (64bit) (Firestorm-Releasex64) with Havok support
Release Notes

You are at 43.2, 201.9, 22.9 in Nanba Beach located at ec2-18-237-102-19.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com (18.237.102.19:13020)
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Nanba Beach/43/202/23
(global coordinates 160,299.0, 265,930.0, 22.9)
Second Life Server 2020-12-09.553685
Release Notes

CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2687W 0 @ 3.10GHz (3092.55 MHz)
Memory: 65494 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 18363.1256)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: Quadro 4000/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 10.18.13.5362
OpenGL Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 353.62

RestrainedLove API: (disabled)
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.54.1 OpenSSL/1.0.2l zlib/1.2.8 nghttp2/1.25.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.10.7
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.00.03
Dullahan: 1.1.1320 / CEF: 3.3626.1895.g7001d56 / Chromium: 72.0.3626.121
LibVLC Version: 2.2.8
Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.9.0002.30313

Settings mode: Firestorm
Viewer Skin: Firestorm (Grey)
Window size: 1846x1057 px
Font Used: Deja Vu (96 dpi)
Font Size Adjustment: 0 pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 128 m
Bandwidth: 500 kbit/s
LOD factor: 2
Render quality: High (5/7)
Advanced Lighting Model: No
Texture memory: 1024 MB (1)
VFS (cache) creation time (UTC): 2020-12-29T15:50:34 
Built with MSVC version 1800
Packets Lost: 5/455,523 (0.0%)
December 29 2020 11:45:28 SLT