Marc Chamerberlin

Thank you all for somegreat advice. As an experiment, I bench tested SLV and Firestorm using my Intel HD 4000 on board adaptor on the same parcel that had some trees and fine grass. Here is a summary of the settings in each... Quality bar = between high and ultra Advanced lighting on, but no shadows No ambient occlusion Draw distance: FS 600m, SLV 512 m (this was the max from what I could see) Hardware settings : Anisotropic Filtering on, Open Gl Vertex buffer on, Streamed VBO's on, Antialisaing disabled. Results: FS has an acceptable 12 - 30 fps. SLV couldn't even move, the screen wouldn't even refresh for me to see the FS meter change. So to say that I'm pleased FS has saved me $200 on an NVIDIA video card is putting it mildly !

My apologies I shoudl have included that info. I've resolved it by ... - updating intel on-board HD4000 drivers. Improved framerate by about 10% - using Firestorm viewer. The framerate improvement was noting short of drastic. SL Viwer - 10-20 FPS. Firestorm, 35-50 FPS. This is without shadows of course, but I can live without that.

I am using the default SL viewer.

My ASUS on-board video adapter handles SL well for the most part, reflected water and such - except when I visit a region with lots of trees, jungle, grass moving in the wind, and/or fog . My frame rate then diminishes noticibly. Can anyone recommend a not-too-expensive PCI express video card that can handle these features? My budget is $200 Aust. I just dont want to spend $400-$500 on a top of the line card and power supply only to find the improvement is marginal. Thank you!