The optimization thread....

After I talked to people in SL I found that it was running slower at my computer than it should be. So I figure here is a thread we can share some optimization suggestions.

Firstly, my card was running in PCI mode. This took a while to figure out how to fix. Including having HP support tell me that my computer was supposed to run in PCI mode. Eventually I managed to figure out what chipset my HP had, by running SiSoftware Sandra. There it said HP and a number, though it turned out the number was that of an Intel chipset. Running an Intel chipset update fixed it. All rather confusing. Unfortunately, this hardly improved the frame rate in SL at all.

I tried lowering all kinds of settings. The most effective one was setting trees to lowest quality. Then I turned of the Avatar Vertex thing. It's a little confusing since it says faster after it, so I figured it would be faster with it turned on, but it was not. All of a sudden my frame rater increased by about x3 to x4. I had previously noticed that when there was no avatar in the picture I could get frame rates above 40fps, but as soon as I had 1 avatar on the screen and at a reasonably close range the speed dropped to around 9fps. This may not apply to all graphics card, as maybe some newer ones do this in hardware (whatever the avatar vertex setting does).

After doing a lot of optimizing, I've got SL looking more or less the same as it did before, but a 3-4 times fps increase.

Finally, my specs. P4 1700mhz, 1 gig RAM, nVidia Quadro2 Pro (41.09 driver...I installed an older one intentionally), connection speed of aprox. 2mbit and plenty of disk space.

Share your optimization suggestions here?

Little

Anisotropic filtering. Easy to turn on and off. It improves the look of textures but can signifigantly slow your framerates under some circumstances. Turn it off when things get ugly. Thats all I can really think of.

Strange as it may seem, I get a faster average frame rate when I uncheck the AGP box.

In the SIM I used as a test I got 21-22 FPS with AGP ticked and 24-25 FPS without it.

I have 1GB of RAM and a GeForce4 running with the latest NVIDIA and VIA 4-in-1 drivers installed and everything is working fine.

I guess this just proves, like the Avatar Vertex comment above that you should experiment with all the different settings to see what your particular system "likes".

What OS do you have? I've got a very similar setup (Win9, and when AGP got forcibly disabled (Win98 doesn't like doing AGP when you've got a gigabyte or more of memory), my framerate in open areas like the vehicle sims dropped by 70%, while the framerate in crowded areas dropped only slightly.

Just for the record, and to answer your question, I'm on Windows2000 Server, Service Pack 4.