Written 12 May, 2009
Chey’s New Video Card
I’ve been running my new nVidia GeForce 9400GT video card for a week now, and it’s sweeeet.
The installation went well. I just removed my old card and plugged the new one in in its place, then ran the installation disk, then uploaded the latest drivers from nVidia. When I set up my dual monitors, and all was well.
I have all features cranked to the max except for water reflections, which I keep turned off except when taking photos, as reflections are a framerate killer. With a draw distance of 144 meters I’m getting 10-15 fps in most places and as much as 25 fps in sky builds, as compared to 6-7 on the ground and 12 or so in the air with my previous card (and that with some features backed down a bit from max).
My second life experience is noticeable smoother, especially when flying. Rezzing is faster (especially sculpties), although there seem to be some rez problems with the RC 1.23.1 viewer. Even with 1 gb of DDR2 video RAM, the signs in stores can take a while to resolve.
The new card has a big heat sink instead of a fan, so I’m keeping the side of my case off for the summer. This fall I’ll be retiring the VAOI case and transporting its innards to a case that will allow plenty of fans.
The new video card was a steal at $44.99 with free shippping from www.newegg.com.
Chey’s New Video Card
I’ve been running my new nVidia GeForce 9400GT video card for a week now, and it’s sweeeet.
The installation went well. I just removed my old card and plugged the new one in in its place, then ran the installation disk, then uploaded the latest drivers from nVidia. When I set up my dual monitors, and all was well.
I have all features cranked to the max except for water reflections, which I keep turned off except when taking photos, as reflections are a framerate killer. With a draw distance of 144 meters I’m getting 10-15 fps in most places and as much as 25 fps in sky builds, as compared to 6-7 on the ground and 12 or so in the air with my previous card (and that with some features backed down a bit from max).
My second life experience is noticeable smoother, especially when flying. Rezzing is faster (especially sculpties), although there seem to be some rez problems with the RC 1.23.1 viewer. Even with 1 gb of DDR2 video RAM, the signs in stores can take a while to resolve.
The new card has a big heat sink instead of a fan, so I’m keeping the side of my case off for the summer. This fall I’ll be retiring the VAOI case and transporting its innards to a case that will allow plenty of fans.
The new video card was a steal at $44.99 with free shippping from www.newegg.com.
1 comment:
Good job Chey! I've been thinking about upgrading my 8800; my motherboard has PCIEx16 slots so I might go grab two at that price! On the other hand I think I'm CPU bound more than anything else, so I should probably save up for a new mobo/cpu/memory/gpu setup.
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