patpowers

I own and HP Pavilion Quad Core desktop machine that runs at 1.8 Ghz and has 5 gigs of memory, with an All In Wonder HD video card, running Vista. Under ideal conditions with all the graphic settings tweaked as well as I can get them, I get 20-25 FPS. Under most conditions, it's more like 10-12 FPS, that is, other avatars nearby and moving, and in battle I go down to 1-5 FPS.

Is this about right for my machine? Will any amount of tweaking help? Because I've done a lot of it.

Wildefire Walcott

The most important component for FPS is your graphics card. 24FPS sounds about right for "high quality" settings at a reasonable resolution. I did a benchmarking comparison of SL last year, and you'll find your results are pretty typical (note the quality settings I benchmark at.)

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Beezle Warburton

You're doing fine with that.

SL is not optimized well.

On my "ZOMG AWESOME" machine I can get 60-70 FPS when I'm alone.
When I'm around other people. Then it drops into the high teens.

If anything, turn of "Atmospheric Shaders" and turn down your draw distance when you're going to be in combat. Those have the biggest impact.

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patpowers

Are Atmosphetic Shaders the stuff on the Advanced Menu? Footsteps, Fog, Clouds, Particles, etc.? Because if they are, they have little or not effect on my FPS. The only things that have a significant effect is setting my graphics on "crummy" (low quality via Edit/Preferences/Graphics) and not running SL in a window.

Beezle Warburton

[QUOTE=patpowers;811873]Are Atmosphetic Shaders the stuff on the Advanced Menu? Footsteps, Fog, Clouds, Particles, etc.? Because if they are, they have little or not effect on my FPS. The only things that have a significant effect is setting my graphics on "crummy" (low quality via Edit/Preferences/Graphics) and not running SL in a window.[/QUOTE

Check custom in Edit-Preferences-Graphics.

Watch more options appear.

Tess Whitcroft

Also keep in mind that Vista allocates graphics memory as if you were in full screen, even if you are in a window. If you run SL in a window you might want to switch to Windows 7.


Tess

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patpowers

Thanks, Wildfire, that was a really impressive and thorough piece of research.

patpowers

Do you do combat? That's the real test of a machine. In combat with a large number of fighters, I go down so low -- 1 fps or thereabouts -- it's like watching a series of still photos, sort of a cartoon strip. Very hard to fight like that. A frame rate in the teens woudl be a HUGE improvement.

Looks at your next post ... Yeah, been there, done tat. Thanks for the suggestion though.

patpowers

Oh, I run it in a window with high quality graphics ordinarily, then swithch to full screen and ugly mode before I go into combat. It improves my FPS, but not enough.

Beezle Warburton

"Yeah, it'll do that."

My teens FPS are just being in a club dancing with friends.

(Core2Duo 3GHz. nVidia GTX275, 4G DDR2 @ 1066, Win7-64)

Even one-on-one combat can bog to standstill because SL physics never quite got implemented completely. Once the bullets are flying the sim overloads easily because of all the collisions. Then consider your typical roleplay sim is at maximum occupancy. SL doesn't like full sims, either.

I've tried SL combat. I determined that if I wanted to blow some steam off, run around and shoot things I was better off going over to UT2004

Milla Janick

A 1.8Ghz CPU is pretty slow, even with 4 cores because SL isn't great about utilizing multiple cores. ATI's drivers don't really play nice with SL, either.

One thing you can try if you've tweaked graphics settings is to go to the Advanced menu (CTRL-ALT-D brings it up if you don't see it next to the help menu in SL) and under the Rendering section, check the option "Run multiple threads". That should help your frame rate a bit.

Also try Boy Lane's Rainbow Viewer with the SSE2 patch. It should run faster on ATI graphics adapters than the Linden viewer.

Boy Lane - Rainbow Viewer Release 2

Get both files, the viewer and the SSE2 executable.

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