Best viewer for my PC?

[shaynecider]

I've been playing Second Life for quite a while, but recently my old computer that ran Second Life perfectly self destructed. I then got an Alienware M17x R3 thinking it would be good for gaming. It is... except for Second Life. I have tried these viewers already:

Kirstens Viewer

SL Viewer

Firestorm

All of them have a VERY low framerate even on the lowest settings... and I would actually like to be able to see textures and not just grey blobs everywhere.

So can somebody direct me to a viewer that would suit my specs and tell me a good setup for it (what I should the settings at).

Thanks a bunch. *sigh*

Graphics : 1.5GB GDDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M w/ Optimus Technology
Processor : Intel Core i7 Processor 2630QM (2.00Ghz, 6MB, 4C) 

[Chelsea Malibu]

The box you got should work great for any game however, SL is a bit different than most games.  CPU is the most critical and you seem to be covered there and the graphics card is next in your priority which you also seem to be well covered.

I am not sure what is going on within your network which could also be an issue so you may want to reset your modem and router to see if that helps.

I have great luck with Firestorm and even better performance with the soon to be defunct, Phoenix.  Have you tried moving to other sims and less crowded sims to see if the performance is the same?

Also, and here is where the arguments come in, is RAM.  Alienware boxes however usually come with a lot of ram.  My last one has 12 GB which worked great but most think 2 GB is enough.  I and many others feel you need more ram since you are usually loading un-optimized graphics which are usually huge.  Since little is stored client side, everything you see when you enter a scene needs to load into cache.  I often find that while running at higher graphics settings, I get to over 2 Gb of ram for SL alone.

[Theresa Tennyson]

Apparently ALL SL viewers have problems with Nvidia Optimus technology, unfortunately.  This is a link the URL to the bug-report page concerning it. There are some work-arounds that might for you in the comments.

 

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-26533