Graphic cards

[Hiro Starbrook]

This topic has been discussed often but I still have a question.

I have a fairly beefy self-build PC (Intel Core i7 2700K, 8Gb RAM, SSD etc) with an AMD 6950 graphics card (2Gb memory). I installed the latest AMD drivers who are supposed to have improved OpenGL support. SL is running okay but I had expected more somehow. Ultra is still not advised setting for example.

My question is whether someone knows whether an AMD graphic card with these new drivers is comparable in SL performance with an Nvidia card, or whether an Nvidia card is still better? Does somebody have experience?

 

Thanks!

[Alicia Sautereau]

The nvidia cards still perform better with sl, wich is why i dumped my 4 5870`s for 3 580 wich performs better by 15 to 20 fps on even higher settings

 *edit* typo`s

[Nalates Urriah]

Don't let the viewers default setting for your card influence you. The viewer's take on new video cards is notoriously poor.

Set your graphics the way you want and see how it performs.

There are posts in this thread: How Fast is Your Viewer? - Second Life where people have added their information and a rough performance indication. It is not scientific, but it will give you an idea of what kind of performance others are getting.

Add your info to the thread.

You probably understand your graphics settings, but if not check out: Graphics Tweaking for Second Life

If you are looking for performance bottlenecks read: How To get a Faster Second Life. It is mostly about upgrading, but my idea was to help people find which part of their system needed to be upgraded.

[Alicia Sautereau]

No offense intended Nalates, you talk about bottlenecks but not evening covering about memory speed while advising the use of ramdisk

If people with older machines  attempt this with with normal speed memory and harddisc, their windows startup/shutdown will explode exponantialy
Dual/tripple/quad channel makes a difference also
Also forget about normal sata drives, the small 32gig ssd`s wich are perfect for these sort of operations, not to mention a revo drive if you got some money lying on the side.

Also about shutting down/disabling all the windows tasks (services), this is a very bad idea as programs use all sort of window services and windows aswell
Sure, some are useless, but having 1 program/component not working "1 day" is more of an headache to try and figure out what won`t run then leaving it on (expirience)

I would defenetly put a red colored warning that this is for adavnced users or else the might be driven insane to a format and reinstall to fix it

 
This year we`ll be hitting the 600 range of nvidia cards, the 7000 for ati and allready at the socket 2011 cpu`s
I think i`ve missed the part about the upgrade in your article 

 

*edit*

In all fairness, the graphics link is good, but wanted to add 1 thing
On faster machines when you get an high fps, using 8 pre-render, vertical sync and tripple buffer *can* work great
You will get a lower fps but the fram transition would be smoother

This is ofcourse for every one to play with as it`s reall case by case and could improve 1 app/game while killing the other but for sl it works for me very nicely

 

Don`t try this at home kids, it will kill your fps faster then you can blink