Minimum requirements for shadows, etc???

[Alazarin Mondrian]

I installed viewer 2.71 on my computer(s) all excited about the new shadows and other features. When I discovered that simply enabling shadows dropped my framerate by a half I was disappointed but the real showstopper for me was that shadows, ambient occlusion and depth of field all disabled any anti-aliasing resulting in jagged edges :( I have several computers all with various 'low-end' graphics cards: Nvidia 8400GS, Nvidia GT9500, ATI Radeon HD 2600XT, Nvidia GT220.

For all those cards the frame rate dropped by 50% and they lost any anti-aliasing when the new features were enabled. Can't say that I really like the depth-of-field effect. Couldn't see what the ambient occlusion did. Shadows would be nice but I have a horrible feeling that I won't be able to afford a graphics gard that could run at better than 10fps and no 'jaggies' with the new features enabled.

Computers:

1] Q6600 + Nvidia GT220 + 4gB RAM + Win7 64-bit:

2] P4D-945 + Nvidia GT9500 + 2gB RAM + Win-XP:

3] P4-HT 630 + Nvidia 8400GS + 2gB RAM + Win7 64-bit: 

4] P4-HT 630 + ATI Radeon HD 2600XT + 2gB RAM + Win7 64-bit: 

 

With each one of the above machines I can get an acceptable framerate and rendering until I enable shadows, occlusion and depth-of-field. I can't really afford to spend much on graphics cards so I'd appreciate any recommendations that would give me a framerate above 10fps and no jaggies on my Q6600 machine without breaking my li'l piggy bank.

[Jo Yardley]

With my macbook I had to put the graphics settings on max and then later manually turn a few things down again.

SL with the new official viewer now is very very slow, but I've got shadows to work.

Something impossible for Macs with any earlier versions.

Not something I can have activated all the time but defenitely cool for when I wan't to make some awesome snapshots.

[Sephy McCaw]

you'll get "jaggies" no matter what card you use, its been with shadows since the very begining.Theres no way to stop them unless you turn on anti-aliase via the hardware button..if you want a graphics card with over 10 fps with all those turned on you'd need a top of the range card theres no doubt.... the wiki states when they were still unsupported cards above 8800(Nvidia) and 4800 series(AMD)..

Also so you dont get bottlenecked a quad core CPU would do a high end card good

My guess is if your card doesnt sit in the ultra (on the slider in graphics) you wont get any good FPS (high setting, you could push it but i doubt you'd get any fps above 18) 

 

and just to make sure.. your fps will be affected by draw distance too so just check at 64 or something so it doesnt have to draw alot of stuff and add shadows to it

[Alazarin Mondrian]

 

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Sephy McCaw wrote:

you'll get "jaggies" no matter what card you use, its been with shadows since the very begining.Theres no way to stop them unless you turn on anti-aliase via the hardware button...

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Hmmm.... I actually had anti-aliasing turned on in the hardware section of the control panel and it made no difference. I tend to have my draw distance at 256 or 512... a leftover habit from my building days when I was in the buisiness of making epic-scale builds and too lazy to fly around Oh well, I guess I'll have to pass on the eye-candy.

[Paladin Pinion]

I had to turn it off too. My framerate went from 60-75 fps to about 12. Not worth it except for snapshots or an occasional look around.

[Bitterleaf Menges]

I have a Nvidia GTX560ti, which I count as an affordable card, and it runs SL perfectly with shadows and ambient occlusion and 4X anti-aliasing.

I'd wager you'd get decent performance out of a GTX460 and similar priced cards.