Is your Second Life minus an OpenGL accelerator?
Aug 4th, 2006 by ShaunO
Going from an Intel embedded motherboard graphics chipset (a 915 series was it?) to a PCI-E X300 Radeon series card makes all the difference..
The first difference is the (LCD) monitor is driven by DVI so right from the start the display is crisper all round.
Then having a 3D (OpenGL) rendering capable Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) makes a noticeable difference to the performance of the Second Life client application.
The x300 technical specifications are not earth shattering (compared to more expensive options) but cost-performance for a 3D application like Second Life I think is well worth it.. and definitely a more pleasant user experience.
As an aside, a cute tool for checking your overall graphics configuration is ‘dxdiag’ – just do a ‘Start button’ – Run – ‘dxdiag’ to learn everything you never wanted to know about your DirectX and graphics setup..