best graphic card

[kadejsha Vaniva]

can someone tell me what is the best graphic card to use to get the highest graphic settings in sl? i have now on my pc Nvidia Geforce 6150se Nforce 430 help please??

[Charolotte Caxton]

While the best graphics card question essentially depends on what you expect to get out of second life and what your activities in second life are, for example, are you going to be a gamer or a photographer or just a casual observer? Kirsten's is a third party viewer that is very graphics intense, which is to say that it has been developed with photographers and machinimaist's needs in mind. I say that to say this, she has recently released a list of what she considers to be the best graphics cards and here is the link:

http://www.kirstensviewer.com/Blog/177/__Kirstens_GPU_Awards_2011_!__.html

 

eta: I got my graphics card before I knew about ati issues with sl and before the list came out. I have number 3 on the list and I do have pretty shadows, but I totally want a number 1 card I'm just saying that to add to what has been said about certain cards will behave differently depending on your computers specs and what you want out of it

[Chic Aeon]

My only addition to Kirsten's list is that if you want GOOD SHADOWS you need to stick to a NVIDIA card. ATIs aren't recognized and nasty antialias looks insue. I have number 2 card in Kirsten's list. It is great but NO PRETTY SHADOWS

 

 

[Nalates Urriah]

There is no good answer and you have not provided eough tech info for anyone to give a wise answer specific to your machine. Click Help -> About in the viewer and include the info in a post when asking a tech question.

ATI video has a long history of problems with OpenGL, which SL viewers use. So, using ATI has one strike against it starting out.

Recently nVidia has had some problems with its latest drivers and SL users have been trying to figure out the best driver version for their nVidia card.  would say that is hlf a strike against nVidia. However, nVidia is a popular video card for many SL users.

SL does not make use of duel video cards SLI. So, it is better to get one HOT single card than two mediocre cards that combine to give outragious performance in other games.

Several people are using 460 and 560-580 cards and loving it. It really depends on what you want to spend.

If you are enough of an analytic, visit Kirsten's forum and the Phoenix/Firestorm forum and ask the same question, but include you tech data.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Any discreet card you get will probably be better than that nForce 430 (that's an onboard IGP).  Here are the current top end cards for the two major players in the graphics processors

 

nVidia:

http://www.geforce.com/#/Hardware/GPUs/geforce-gtx-590/overview

 

ATI/AMD:

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/Pages/desktop-graphics.aspx

 

Those both are for desktop computers.  They both are the latest card produced by the two manufacturers.  Tomorrow they could be yesterday's news.  Both cards carry some pretty heavy system requirements........most notably power supply requirements.  Judging by the nForce 430 chipset in your computer right now I just about guarantee you'll need a power supply upgrade to go with any high performance card you buy for your machine.  I suggest a power supply with a rating of not less than 800 watts.