Walker

OK, bare in mind I've hardly logged in since Nov/Dec 2007... but I'm certain my system ran Windlight a lot better than this.

My desktop is a couple years old now, but it's still faster than the average SL users IMO and I don't see that many complaints. The most important specs:

Intel Pentium 4 HT 650/3.8 GHz (2MB L2 cache/800 MHz FSB)
XFX GeForce 7950GT/512MB/570MHz (PCI-Express)
2048MB DDR2 RAM.

Not only does this now struggle to run Windlight on 'High' (which has a stupidly low draw distance, compared to the 256m I have become accustomed to since 2006), but it grinds to such a crawl within about five minutes that I just end up shouting at my monitor before logging out.

Perhaps there is a memory leak, but it strikes me as ridiculously slow before much of it has even leaked.

Is there a problem with the RC client, or is this an NVidia driver issue? I notice the NVidia driver software has changed, and lots of people reporting problems. Is there a preferred NVidia driver?

I'm using a fresh install of Windows XP here with all the latest (chipset, gpu, etc.) drivers installed, and barely any background tasks running.

Sveid Heidenstam

A lot of people have been complaining about this RC. Many are finding it much slower than the Windlight First Look people were required to update from.

There are other issues as well, such as not correctly placing attachments, and graphical differences between this RC and the most recent Windlight.

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Walker

Thanks Sveid. I guess I've overlooked the complaints. I should probably check the blog comments after each release.

What surprises me is just how severe this performance difference is, but it's difficult to judge having been out of the game (more or less) for a few months.

Lucifer Baphomet

Its a sorry piece of shit of a client.

Dancien Graves

I have to log out to use Photoshop effectively. That's never happened before.

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Walker

You're not kidding!

The thing is... I'm having problems with the official release now too. When I first login, I get between 20-30fps (closer to 20fps but the spikes are nice ). After a few minutes, it's down to 10fps. When ten minutes have gone by, it's down to 4-5fps.

I allow the relatively empty sim to load, and just fly up and down the same piece of road, and doing that same old thing I see my fps getting lower and lower until I feel it's too laggy to do anything and give up. My draw distance is at a crappy 128m. Eighteen months ago, I'd often have it set to 512m and it wasn't this bad. I'd have it set to 256m all the time as recently as last November. That's impossible now... and my system has fewer background tasks running than ever.

I just don't get it. I'm planning on getting a high-end gaming system soon but I'm not convinced it will make much difference.

FlipperPA Peregrine

Weird - must be some kind of hardware conflict. The new Windlight RC has been performing wonderfully for me - this isn't to discount anyone else's plight, but I find it interesting when I'm unable to reproduce other clients' behaviors... this is what makes testing a browser as complex as SL so difficult. It is probably tuned just perfectly for the default Linden Lab employee's machines!

Regards,

-Flip

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WarKirby Magojiro

Flip. Attach to.. is not working. Particles are considerably weaker, there;s a simcrashing exploit in the new parcel meda controls. Sculpted prims are getting essed up LOD and showing half rezzed up close. Notecards, textures, and scripts are collapsed into a broken window half the time when opening

1.19.1 RC is among the worset client releases ever. Stick with 1.19.0 (5) for now.

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Walker

I'm wondering if there's some kind of hardware fault. I was having the same problem before I reinstalled XP over the weekend. I installed Vista inbetween, and it was pretty much the same.

Even though the system is otherwise running fine and fast, I'll run memcheck overnight tomorrow. I don't have time to arrange that right now. I suppose it's possible my graphics card is faulty. If so, I will cry.

I figured most people were running SL reasonably OK or I'd have seen complaints all over the place. That you're running this latest version of Windlight OK suggests a new computer will make a noticeable difference anyway. Buying a new Quad core computer, with 4 Gig or RAM and 2xSLI GPUs seems a bit overkill just to get SL running acceptably though.

Miriel Enfield

Latest release is working fine for me, lag wise. Particles are all weird, though, and I'm getting some ugly shading artifacts on my light colored walls. Don't know if the latter are new, though.

nadir

I've definately been having memory leak issues ... i've got a P4HT too. It got better when I upgraded my radeon XT9600 to a couple models above ... but I think to resolve the whole thing, I might just retire the pc and upgrade everything all together.

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Walker

I upgraded from a Radeon XT9600 too. This XFX card is the bees knees. Granted, superceded by the NVidia 8 series, but still the best in the 7 series, overclocked out of the box and a very good performer even by today's standards.

I've been running Doom 3 on it tonight because if anything's gonna choke it on high quality settings, that's it. But no, it runs flawlessly. The system is otherwise fine and fast.

I've been messing around with it for hours, optimizing the GPU settings for performance over quality, thinking it would at least allow me to attend Brig's PMG event tonight, but no, it still grinds down to 4fps within minutes and the client becomes totally unusuable.

So I guess it's official. An Intel Pentium 4 HT 3.8 GHz (800 MHz FSB) processor, a high performance GPU (GeForce 7950GT/512MB DDR3 RAM/570MHz clock), and 2048MB DDR2 RAM, are no longer suitable for running SL. For some of us.

Sorry, I'm descending into a rant. I'm just really annoyed that I'm out of SL until I buy another computer, when these specs should be more than adequate.

I give up.

Allison Cleanslate

I'm having the same problems as you, Walker Granted, my computer is a little old, but sl was running fine before these latest updates. Now, I can't move and alot of textures and prims just never load. I don't have anything to add besides that...just wanted to reaffirm that youre not the only one having issues.

Walker

Sorry you're having trouble too Allison.

I managed to check my memory and HDD for errors overnight and they're apparently fine. I'm going to install Linux later, in the hope it will run better on that.

Lucifer Baphomet

Ive noticed probs with frame rates across all the clients recently...
Strangely zooming waaaay out then back in seems to help it, or fiddling with the bandwidtn controls in preferences. Sometimes one works.. sometimes the other.

Ewan Took

I was thinking the light was back to the 'harsh' settings that they had originally. Difficult to tell without re-installing the old client but my avatar does seem to look more shadowed again.

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Sveid Heidenstam

I just discovered that I cannot save textures to my hard drive in this client, regardless of the permissions. I even attempted to save a texture I had uploaded myself, and it would not let me.

BEARintheMorning

Yep, I discovered this yesterday. I had to log in with the old regular client to do this.

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Walker

Thanks! I'll give that a try.

I've since installed Fedora 8, and am having far better results. Flying around Waterhead, I was getting 20+ fps. (30+ avatars were in the sim, so not bad at all.) Flying around Waterworks, I was getting 30-35fps. (5 or six avs in the sim.)

I came back to Windows to ensure the Nvidia driver settings were the same, and they were. I logged in and within minutes, I was down to 4-5fps in both sims, despite starting at over 20fps. This was despite the draw distance being set lower than it was on SL/Linux.

I can't live in Fedora though because I am now so dependent on Windows applications, for both work and leisure. I'll keep my fingers crossed and try out your suggestion a bit later.

(Btw, there's not much between Windlight and the regular client on Linux -- from an FPS point of view. Not on my setup anyway. I was quite impressed.)

Walker

39.7fps on the meter in this snapshot (SL on Fedora 8 (x86_64))...



Same computer. Different operating system. SL is ten times faster. Weird.

Either Linux handles memory leaks a heck of a lot better than Windows or I really have got an elusive hardware conflict or bad driver somewhere (I really don't think so though.)

Huns Valen

It does that thing where you look in a certain direction and it freezes for up to a minute solid.

Then it recovers and goes back up to the previous high FPS.

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Penny Patton

I have been getting a pretty decent framerate. Better than some of the Windlight clients, actually. However, ja, it does the freezing thing. I'd be happier with a somewhat lower framerate if it stopped freezing.

The thing is, I don't have to turn in any direction for it to freeze like that. I can just sit there, either chatting and not actually moving my av or the camera, and it will freeze. I have sat back from the keyboard, thinking about whatever building or scripting project I would be working on at the time, and actually seen all the animated objects in the background (rotating prims or animated textures, with my draw distance at minimum and absolutely no one else around) just freeze. Sure enough, client freeze.

And when it does that, it freezes my entire computer.