Dean Haystack

The amount of miss information around these is always depressing. Before anything, lag is a loose term that more often than not is used incorrectly to label a problem that is no such thing. Secondly, scripts don't impact the frame rate performance of the viewer... Scripts run on Linden Labs servers, they impact other scripts running on that SIM and on every SIM running on that CPU, it has nothing to do with the ability of your personal machine to render frames. As someone else mentioned, SL is not a game, from it's inception on 2003 and without taking away from the amazing technical achievements, SL graphics engine was always sub par, and even with all the added on features is it sill subpar today, couple that with the liberal use of texture and you have a real problem in your hands. With all that said, LL is partially at fault here as well as GPU manufacturers to a lesser degree, I can tell you for example at least 2 AMD GPUs that I've owned in the past get artifacts for no good reason. That could, at least partially, explain the problems your GTX 1080 is having, it's not the first time I've heard Pascal GPUs delivering sub par performance compared to older lesser cards, like someone mentioned here the Maxwell GTX 970. I can tell you that right now I am not using the latest drivers for my GPU, because they make shadows flicker like a Christmas tree. So your problem might just be compatibility issues, Nvidia won't even look at it because SL has such a small audience, and LL is too busy spending SL profits on Sansar and Blockworld to do anything about it.

Before anything that is NOT a gaming laptop. The 940MX is just a re-brand of the 940M, which is a 2 year old GPU, basically it has a slightly higher clock. This card doesn't even have a desktop version, since it's a sub-entry level GPU, basically you get a card that can aid the CPU on certain tasks but not much else. At least the screen is only 1600x900, so it doesn't have as many pixels as a 1080p display to push around. Now I notice you mention you went for the 32GB of RAM, let me tell you with unless you're planning on having 100 tabs open on your web browser, that's over kill speically considering your CPU, plus I hope you're not planning on rendering videos while running SL at the same time on this laptop.

Before anything make sure you have an extra RAM slot available, the Asus H81M-K only has 2 slots for DDR3 @ 1600 MHz MAX. So do you have one 4GB stick or two sticks with 2GB each for a total of 4GB? If you have two sticks of 2GB the best you can do is get rid of those and buy 2 sticks of 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz RAM, since the Asus H81M-K can only handle 16GB of RAM max. Alternatively if you only have one stick of 4GB of RAM, buy another one (of the same frequency, 1600, 1333 or 1066 you need to check) so you can had to have 8GB and not having to spend a lot of money. Now, for the GPU which is what you were asking, and considering your CPU, I'd go with: AMD RX 460 GTX 1050 GTX 1050Ti AMD RX 470 In that order, according to how much you wanna spend, check availability near you. A GPU better than that would be rather pointless since it would be bottlenecked by your CPU.

You should know for what you'll spend on a laptop, you'd get a lot more "power" from a desktop that costs the same. When you see, for example, a NVIDIA 960M on a laptop it's NOT the same as an NVIDIA 960 on a desktop. So you'll get more for your money on a desktop.

The problem is the current entry-level/mid-range NVIDIA GPUs aren't as good as AMD ones. You can see this by looking at the countless video comparissons on youtube between the graphics in video games, personally I was looking at the AMD R9 390 8GB which was gonna cost me 370 €. For that money, I can get a NVIDIA GTX 970 4GB and the problems start right there, half the VRAM for the same price, and when I see FPS comparissons between both cards in regular AAA games, the R9 390 wins more often. So the R9 390 would be a smarter choice, specially since it's more future proof with the 8GB VRAM but I know where you are coming from Jean, everyone running SL in and AMD R series is complaining about bugs, artifacts and glitches and the only way to get rid of those is to lower the graphic settings, not something you'd wanna do on a piece of software that came out in 2003, I know I know, it's a million miles from what it was, but who can resist? Personally I don't wanna get the GTX 970, because the problem with it's 3,5+0,5GB VRAM (google it) honestly what I'll likely do, and recomend to anyone thinking about buying a computer right now for SL, is to wait till spring (2016) when the new line up of GPUs is probably gonna come out, here's hoping NVIDIA will do a better job, because I'm not one bit confident AMD can suddenly fix all the problems it always had.

This sucks beyond believe since I was looking at the exact same card, R9 390 8GB. Frankly with a card like that I wouldn't settle for anything other than ultra settings since my current (pretty old) AMD 6770 1GB is capable of some pretty impressive pictures. Right now I cannot think about buying something that wouldn't work with SL, so for the TC I guess the nVidia equivalent is the GTX970, but not only that one (at my retailer) costs a bit more, it also only has 4GB of VRAM and if that wasn't bad enough it's not really 4GB, it's 3,5GB + (ultra slow) 500MB. So frankly, maybe just wait till spring for a new line up of GPUs, that's what I probably gonna do.

I got the impression you kinda like Civilization II... on topic, fix what needs fixing since always LL. Group chat, sim crossing, better graphic engine (not saying better graphics, just a more efficient graphic engine on the viewer because this one is really old and it has more patches than a patch box)

Listen to your user base LL. First fix what's long overdo, more ram, and a brand new graphics engine? It's a shame that my laptop that plays BF3 on ultra chokes a bit on SL in ultra with all the eye candy on.

I don't think mesh will be that big that fast, most people are still using V1 based viewers thanks to the awful V2 interface, i don't think people will jump to V2 viewers until Firestorm interface gets as close as it can possible be to what you see in a V1 viewer. And on top of that most people struggle to rezz sculpted prims which are really low polygon 32x33, imagine how long it would take them to rezz a mesh object, much much more poly heavy. Having all that said mesh looks great and brings a hole new visual appeal to SL, but, i honestly don't see people making mesh stuff to sell much less people buying mesh stuff when you go anywhere on the grid and about 80% or more people are running phoenix.