Second Life and Virtual Worlds
NVIDIA has released a new video card. New this card is retailing at US$110. It is considered a mid range video card. For Second Life® it is a decent card.
The card comes with 2 Gigabytes of Video Ram (VRAM). It uses 65 watts of power, the same as a GT 440. The card is supposed to be 40% faster than the GT 440.
The GTX cards are better than the GT and GTS cards. However, this GT 640 does pretty well for the cost.
nVidia has a new driver out today, version 301.42. This is the first WHQL-certified driver in the 300 release series.
This update provides WHQL support for the 600 series nVidia cards.
It provides performance improvements for 500 series cards.
There is a whole load of stuff added. FXAA has been improved to be 60% faster at MSAA 4x levels. Adaptive vertical sync has been added. I doubt the SL viewers can use that. Target FPS is included but games have to support it. Does SL? I don’t think so. But, I don’t know. New multi-screen, 3D Vision, and SLI features.
In the previous article, nVidia Update and Goodies, I talked about the release of a new 295.73 version driver. Now we are getting reports of nVidia Driver 295.73 causing Second Life Viewers to crash. The Firestorm/Phoenix Development team is reporting Firestorm users with GTX460 cards and 295.73 are having problems.
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This is not the first time we have had problems with nVidia 460 cards. See: nVidia Driver GTX 460 Problems.
For Those using nVidia 450 and 460 cards it is advised they roll back to driver version 285.62 WHQL.