well.. 1024 its a lot for a planet texture, that's one of the reason for frame drop... try one of my models ? that you download

same frma rate with yout earth_2 mesh mate. but i dont think its a texture problem just haveing a single 2k model with a 1024 texture should not hit the frame rate at all should it?

Geforce 5xxx cards are very slow with shaders, I guess that is the reason.

could you reccomend a good one, i only just bought this cos my last card died on me

well depends on your BIOS, but Express cards are the best, i would ask slin, i guess he have a better experience about performance and cards.
I like Ati's they seams fast and good. Though Nvidea are good too.. sometimes the CPU Core also helps alot.

uuuuh, shader calculations aren't done on the CPU, so that wouldn't help improve shader performance. Any current generation card (even budget ones) will do just fine with most shaders.

Exactly
I prefer NVIDIA cards because of a bit better technology (I think that they were far earlier than ATI with alphablending with fp textures for example :P) and they offer a stereo driver :P I also heared that their support is quite good.

Yes thats true, besides, i know that ati has some problems / bugs/ and some driver conflits all the time.

Thanks for the UC Mike, although trouble shooting can be harsh, I appreciate the effort

About the GPU choise-issue, I think it's also a socket matter.
Most modern motherboards are supported with PCI Express and regarding to what nVidia did with it (HSI -> AGP and PCI Express compatible), ATI is better of when looking at the benchmark results. But it's only about a couple of percent that we're talking here. More important is what makes PCI Express better to AGP. Here's a simple diagram to indicate why:

Send - recieve - send - recieve -> AGP
Send and recieve - send and recieve - send and recieve - send and recieve -> PCI Express

Which simply states the fact that PCI Express provides a higher bandwidth.

But I somehow still like nVidia better in comparison to ATI due to the elements Slin mentioned before

Cheers

Frazzle

this is so off topic, but i like to view people profiles, to have an idea of the person we talk too, we are all so young here... 20's mostly. Wondering why we don't have more knowledge about everyone here, we could be friends, share things hum, msn adresses etc..

:: get back to topic::
Its a shame laptops can't work like uSB drives, that you could change card