What Video Card Do I need?

[Jim Crisp]

My computer is displaying signs of a sick motherboard. It is six years old. I think it is rime to replace it. It has an RTX 3090 video card. When I went from an RTX 1080 to the RTX 3090, I stiopped having lag.

My question for you is this: Do I need to get an RTX 4090 for my new computer, or would my RTX 3090 perform just as wall? The only performance I am concerned about is Second Life.

[Frionil Fang]

It takes maxing out a lot of settings to make a 3080 drop below 60 fps (limited to 60 max) under most circumstances and it doesn't hit 100% GPU usage even then, so I doubt going from a very high end card like 3090 to an extremely high end 4090 would make much of a difference for SL. 

[AmeliaJ08]

No, you don't need anything new. Put the 3090 in a new motherboard.

RTX cards are mostly wasted in SL, it's not a modern game and isn't really even using many of the capabilities anyway. An RTX 3090 is more than enough, an RTX 3060 is arguably more than enough.

 

[Toothless Draegonne]

I'm mostly on SL with a laptop using a 3070ti, in a modified Ultra detail level, so your 3090 will be absolutely fine. If you want to run minspec, you can probably get away with 1060-tier cards and even less. VRAM is more important in SL than the raw compute performance of the GPU.

[RicDelMoro]

If everything else is going well , except playing  SL"PBR" , what is the most obvious conclusion , and what do you think is most likely to happen ?

a) A lot of people going to buy new computers just because SL requires it .

b) A lot of people leaving SL  and going to do other activities .

[AmeliaJ08]

SL doesn't require a new computer to run PBR. A GTX1060 is enough, a GTX970 is likely enough.

If your computer struggled to run SL with ALM enabled (10 years old) then sure, it'll struggle with PBR. The time to fix that problem was years ago though.

 

Edited July 30 by AmeliaJ08

[Katherine Heartsong]

3090 is fine. I'm on a 3070, running full screen on an ultra wide UHD 4K monitor at a capped and steady 40fps with most settings maxxed out.

A 3090 is more than fine.