Virtual Worlds and Your Graphics Driver : How Important Is It ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Very Important !

    Virtual Worlds such as SecondLife and OpenSim, are basically streaming services, however unlike a typical video game in which all of the textures are static ( embedded into the program itself ) just about everything in SL or OS is user created, and thats what make our chosen Virtual Worlds so unique and special. However there are some downsides to this, not everyone creating things in a VW has the luxury of being properly trained in the art of efficient graphics design. So we end up running across some very interesting and killer things during our virtual travels, that may or may not have been built ( designed ) with efficiency in mind. This can put a huge strain on your graphics hardware, and if you are not using an up to date driver for your hardware, the results can be less than the best you can achieve.

     First off if you are on a laptop 9 out of ten times you will have integrated graphics in the CPU or Mother Board and stuck with what ever you have. If you are on a Desktop rig more and likely you can simply install a new graphics card, either Nvidia or AMD/ATI, and there are a plethora of various brands for each, EVGA, PNY, MSI, ASUS, GIGABYTE........

    But thats besides the point, you really need to insure that the most up to date Video Driver for your hardware is installed and set up properly. Checking out your hardware vendors proper website for graphic driver updates is an unfortunate downside of being able to fully enjoy an immersive Virtual World experience.

http://www.geforce.com/drivers

http://www.amd.com/en-us

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/

Nvidia and AMD/ATI are pretty much no-brainers and you should have no difficulty finding the correct driver for your hardware, INTEL, good luck with that one.

JayR Cela