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septimusminimus

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  1. I'm not going to pretend I truly know, however many people are now running 64-bit Linux distros, while most versions of Second Life are 32-bit compiled. I tried mucking around with getting the compatibility layer needed to bridge architectures working on this LInux Mint/Debian-taste box, but gave up in favor of a native Singularity compile. That 64-bit version worked perfectly; every other viewer threw errors. May or may not be related, but it's a common error, and I recall dealing with it (more successfully!) during my previous stints running desktop Linux.
  2. I've picked up a used ultraportable as of late. GMA 4500/Core 2 Duo ULV @ 1.2Ghz, Win 8. 64-bit, pushing a 1024x768 panel. Tried latest Firestorm, Cool VL 1.26.4, and Rainbow Viewer 1.22 so far. Rainbow Netbook Viewer crashes on launch. Firestorm is fastest, strangely, but still unusable without setting draw distance to twenty, grass off, all lights off, all textures off/unloaded too. Having it look like like a sea of grey and blur, I can do 15FPS on my Linden home and 3.5-5FPS in a crowded space, Turning on grass alone is slaughter. Firestorm maxes CPU, others don't. Most reports regarding the chip are from '09, when I pulled 10FPS/low with a FX5200 at the time... or too dated. Is anyone getting the mobile 4500 to work with textures, 32 draw distance and some grass rendering too? Yes... if not clear..; I'm acquainted with the performance level of the Intel GMA 4500 Accelerator. Business graphics + light gaming of four years ago. Also, GTX460 for the desk. Ain't luggin' no behemoth!
  3. Also... 'nother thing of note. New drivers bring newer/better OpenGL support. SL OpenGL support is a moving target. I think that's why SL will run poorly or not at all on machines with broken Open GL support (e.g, bad years Ati/IGP 345) or machines running old drivers.
  4. Some truth to this. Apparently, last of the line video drivers sometimes bring regressions regarding performance and features. Peak stability + performance tends to come somewhere in the middle of a card's run, though older Ati may be an exception. In any case, I lept on this update immediately; I've been running Windows 8 for about a month now, but not with an official driver. This one seems to work a tad better, though I still can't set my acellerator's core voltage in software. Ack!
  5. Both prior posters are so very right as well as so very, very wrong. The 9600GT is an old card, and was only a mid-range one at the time. It's going to slow down quite the bit with lighting + shadows enabled in crowded sims, especially if coupled with an expansive draw distance. However, it's still at least as fast as many/most of today's entry-level discrete cards, and is much, much more powerful than the basic integrated graphics in machines not made within the last year or so. In fact, it's still probably going to be faster than even teh latest Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer graphical outings. I'd suggest you'll be unable to move effectively in populated sims with lighting and shadows, but be able to go to clubs and such with most other sliders fairly high up. It'll give you a better experience than most your grid peers. Considering these cards can now be bought for maybe thirty bucks and a bag of chips, I think they're a great bet for casual players.
  6. This is a cheap, basic Facebook machine. Stateside, it'd cost $350 anyday and any place. Sorry that you paid more. It's far from an ideal machine, however Intel's on-CPU graphics are a revelation over their older offerings. Your 3D accelerator should run Second Life at medium or better settings using a modern viewer such as Dolphin or Firestorm. Obviously, something else is wrong with your setup. I suggest you try uninstalling you acellerator drivers, then re-installing them with the latest ones procured from Intel's Website. If that fails, try using a third party viewer if you haven't already. I'm big on CoolVL for legacy and Dolphin 3.x for the newer branch, but your tastes may obviously vary. Why? TPVs implement various bugfixes from the JIRA bug tracker and elsewhere, meaning they're often going to be more stable, or at least work in certain situations where the official LL one won't.
  7. Is there any reason why you can't let Nvidia's control panel delegate graphics settings to programs such as SL? I'm doing that with the same card you do, and I'm not having any issues regarding performance. I'm able to go to all sims with all settings on their highest, Shadows and 16x anti-aliasing included. At a low, I see about 8FPS. That'd be in the most crowded of sims of miserable repute.
  8. Additional word of advice: never, ever "clean" your registry. This idea came about back in the Windows 95 era, when there was little registry checking and computers had so little memory that extra entries would actually consume noticable amounts of the resource. Now, resgitry error are very, very rare, any program is far more likely to break things than fix them, and any improvements in performance would require a cesmium clock to measure. These applications are scarcely better than memory compressors(!)
  9. I'm afraid what you are looking for does not exist right now. It's quite the shame too, considering how many people do like to use SL at work, run businesses in SL, suffer hardware failures, own laptops with subpar graphics (e.g, Intel GMA). If you have access to even a toaster of a computer, do try Slitechat. It's tested by yours truly and works very quickly on a Pentium 3 running Windows 2000. Otherwise, Slitechat and Mobilegridclient both seem stable enough on Android hardware. Too bad there's nothing web based available anymore. There was once an AJAX-based web-client, but RIP. Sorry!
  10. (posting intent: curious if others with ATI accelerators, esp. 4xxx series, are seeing brutally and unreasonably pegged CPUs, terrible load times and frame rates too) I've had an HD4850 accelerator since back when they were fashionable, always used to run Second Life and nothing else. I've used it under Linux, Windows XP/32 and 7/64, using myriad third party clients. Always latest versions of clients plus accelerator drivers, naturally. Regardless, it rarely ran better than the 8600GT I pulled it for; sometimes, it ran much worse. For an extreme case, there was a stretch where I was seeing 10FPS on ultra low settings at 1280x1024 under XP. With modern settings on a 3.X client, the card pegged both cores of my E6300@ 3.95GHZ Wolfdale, leaving my avatar sldiing through a slideshow world. Horrible. Plain horrible. Long-standing, too. Deferred rendering plain slaughtered the system. I was looking for a deal on a new i5 2500K/1155 just so I could sucessfully partciipate here in SL. Silly me! Now I have the new GTX460 768MB in ($80, free shipping! Night vs. day. The CPU never hits full utilization at the stock 2.8GHZ. Yes. Same Dolphin 3.x client, same other components, same install too. It's doing 20-35FPS where the old would do 2-15FPS depending upon astral alignment. Often, the old would perk up if I minimized the window, disabled and re-enabled vertex buffering, killed vertex buffering if under Linux; it would randomly lurch to a standstill too (e.g, 3FPS and declining,) only to pick up a semblance of performance at a later time.) I expect great criticism here. I'd be reticent to stir the waters, save that my HD4850 has brought me such great frustration for so long. Obviously, you will all bring up arguments surrounding causation vs. correlation, anecdotes to contrary and attacks on the messenger's hardware and system configuration too. I don't care to start a flame war. Not my intent. I just want others to be careful before buying into the used FPS -> dollar bargain H48xx-series 3D accelerators, as well as perhaps considering older notebooks with disrete ATI GPUs (ex 3650, 4350 -> curious to hear other reports).
  11. For most, however, 100 percent CPU utilization is just a fact of life in SL. Certainly, keeping settings low, and especially, never, ever using deferred rendering might leave some people below full load, it's not going to be enough for older or basic hardware, especially so all-to-common systems with older GMA 950-X4500 integrated. I highly doubt many of these people are seeing crashes from overheating either; stock systems come with adequate cooling, and dust and dirt takes years to accumulate even in rather agressive settings (e.g, ownr of long-haired cat who smokes straight-cuts at PC).
  12. The GTX550Ti is a fairly weak card, too, and frequently gets panned for being much slower than the GTX560ti, yet too close in price. I'd suggest you go Geforce 560 or keep your current, pretty reasonable and nearly as fast GST250. AMD did just drop a new Radeon series, so if you play other games than Secondlife, you might wish to look at that, too; i'm not much familiar with it yet. GTS250 + GTX550Ti bench: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-550-ti-gf116-radeon-hd-5770,2892-5.html Windows XP 32-bit is fine, as Secondlife viewers won't use over about two gigabytes of RAM, While 32-bit XP can only address around 3.25 gigabytes in a typical setup, between the game, your OS, plus background processes, you'll yet have breathing room. As for the CPU, Intel sells the Itanium, not AMD. I also am sure you do not have an Itanium, as they're expensive, used in servers, and don't wun X86 code natively. What I can tell you, though, is that Secondlife is a CPU-bound game and does require a very fast processor. AMD cores, even Phenom II, run to the weak side. Secondlife can scale past two cores now, but not perfectly. In any case, a Phenom II or Core 2 Duo dual core, even if overclocked, is a bit weak for lighting/shadows. You'd do well to pull your current CPU, hawk it on Ebay (great resale value,) and buy a new Phenom x4. Supplies are getting slim, so you might have to resort to Ebay for this; fear not, though, as Ebay has many deadstock CPU sellers. If you really wanted to go big, and this might actually be prudent, sell your motherboard + CPU as a combo and instead buy an i5 2500k, new 1155 motherboard, plus an aftermarket cooler for the overclocking Intel chips are so well suited to.
  13. Hmm. You really do have a first-generation netbook, and those have all the power of a last-generation Pentium III. Painful indeed, and I'm surprised Windows Vista and up are sufferable on it. If you want to run Secondlife, you could probably get buy to start on a cheap used dual-core desktop with an aftermaket video card. That would be fine for medium settings and maybe even high too. Should be ablke to get a used tested/working dual core desktop for about $75 if you wait a bit on Craigslist. Budget $50 for a video card. I'm thinking HD4770 or HD 4850 based upon prices/raw power, and the fact that they actually can run fine on stock 300 watt power supplies as they only draw about nine amps off the 12 volt rail (will need a 6 pin spliiter though). Geeks.com has both video cards, new/deadstock, for $50 shipped!
  14. Pretty much all third-party viewers take advantage of multi-threading by default at this point. I know it's on in my client, and was by default too. In any case, I didn't realize Secondlife clients could effectively spread tasks out past the first two cores. That's great news, as while Core 2 Quad CPUs can't overclock nearly as far as a Core 2 Duo, if Secondlife scales very well to four, a Core 2 Quad would still work out to be reasonably so faster than my Core 2 Duo. Old stuff, for sure, but given my CPU still holds decent residual value, we're talking maybe $50-75 to upgrade. I'll have to look further into this, as if the scaling isn't very smooth, a mediocre quad might not prove a sufficient boost over my C2D.
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