How fast should it be?

After tweaking everything possible on my computer, from adding more ram, to overclocking my videocard, I have come to the conclusion that I have bad luck with your game. AGP 4X mode is enabled, I've tried with upto 1 gig of ram and no swap file, ive tweaked every single setting in the game to every parameter it is capable of tweaking to, and the only difference seems to be about a 4-5fps speedup after taking everything down to extremely low settings.. AGP accel on, nothing else.. lowest quality textures, lowest object detail, 800x600.. The most I can muster during normal gameplay is around 15fps.

Maybe.

At the highest end I can do: 4xAA enabled, aniso/lighting/shadows all on, 1024x768 (monitor sucks ) 512 meter viewing distance, i get 4-8fps overall.
My system specs are as follows:
AMD Athlon XP 1700+
PNY Geforce4 TI4200 overclocked to 385Core/512mem
512M DDR266 Memory (Also added another 512 DIMM for a total of 1GB and I noticed no difference at all)
IWill KA266-R AliMagik1 Motherboard - latest ALi drivers
Windows XP 2600, no servicepack yet but all the newest hotfixes
DirectX 9.0
nVidia 40.72 (41.09 has some texture problems in other games, haven't tried the 42.x betas)
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz PCI audio (if it matters)
3com 3c905-TX NIC
Network going thru my linuxbox for NAT, hasn't slowed down any other game though.. Ports are forwarded properly as well.
Connection is through Time Warner Austin's RoadRunner service, with an earthlink/Mindspring IP. Same exact cable line/speed/ping/routing as my roommate who is on 'plain old RoadRunner' (2 modems, that way we dont impede eachother's bandwidth)

If anyone with similar hardware is getting higher framerates, please let me know! If this is all I can expect, I hope that the engine improves quite significantly, else your minimum specs of a 800ghz CPU, 256mb ram, geforce2 should be considered 'barely enough to give you a picture' and the reccommended should be a 2ghz P4 / XP2000+(or better) with 512 megs ram, and a GeforceFX....

And no, I'm not the happiest camper at this current moment, if anyone's wondering.

Attached is a fairly 'normal' screenshot, not looking at much thats interesting, texture/object quality medium, all checkboxes in the game turned off (anisotropic/lighting and such) and no antialiasing. This is about as fast as it ever gets during normal play. It does get faster, say 30fps, if im looking at a corner out onto the ocean with -nothing else- in my view. (~14KTris per frame)

Mike

First I wanna see the game that has the min req of "800ghz" hehe. I know what ya meant tho.

Seriously:

Why are you overclocking your vid card? Unless you have some extra cooling devices on there the chances are overclocking will actually slow down your video rather than make it faster. Why? Cuz when you run em faster then they are supposed to data gets missed, and you have to back trace to get it. When working with advanced cpus like GeForce which does pipelining etc. you don't just lose that one cycle, you loose a whole bunch.

Try the latest official nvidia driver. It really does work the best. Do -not- use leaked betas for this game. Graphic glitches galore.

About two cable modems....if you are in the same house, getting it from the same network, then I am sorry to say you are wasting money. The way cable works, everyone in the neighborhood is on the same network group. If my neighbor and I both try to download huge files at the same time, it will slow us both down. You may get a minimal sometime improvement if there is a cap per modem .... but your talking an extra couple hundred k, sometimes, assuming no other internet slow downs and you are maxing the speed of the service.

Why havn't you service packed XP? You really should just cuz.

And finally ....

No one gets stellar frame rates. I average between 15 and 25 I think, lower in high density areas. The slow down is not your computer though most likely, it is the servers and lag. And a LOT of work is going into addressing that.

Things to do:

Make sure the ingame chache setting is at the highest (1000mb).

Lower draw/view distance (this setting improves performance more than any other single settings).

Do a clean install, making sure the directory was completely deleted.

Be patient. This isn't (yet?) a game about great frame rates, it's a game about great potential. I mean, it will never be UT. Too much is dynamic, too much data has to be constantly sent to your computer to update it. SL is essentially a really advanced streaming media. A lot of effort is going into making it stream faster, but that is the biggest slow down.

Well, lets see. Got a few answers for ya

800ghz..I'd love to see something that fast sitting underneath my desk. However, I think that would have the heating power of a gas-fired furnace, give me microwave burns sitting next to it, and would require a small house sized air conditioner just to keep it cool

As for the video card questions: 285/512 has worked well for every single game I've tried it with and is very stable. Most games show between 5-15fps increase compared to the 'default' of 250/513 my card came with. What's odd IMHO is that the default ram clock of this card is 513, which does lock up at some times. As I said in my earlier post, I will stick with nVidia 40.72 for a few reasons, first and foremost since it is WHQL, and secondly, some Direct3D programs have trouble displaying textures with any newer driver, Specifically 41.09. FWIW I did try it for a few hours the other night, and while it didnt show any graphics artifacting in Second Life, it didn't give me any framerate improvements either.

Regarding the cablemodems- Yes, its true that they are shared for each neighborhood. However, my neighborhood has plenty of bandwidth to spare. Based on the number of wifi nodes I've personally sniffed out and connected to, (Netstumbler and a laptop on laundry night is an interesting way to wait for the dryer to finish) the ratio of RoadRunner to DSL of some sort, or BBNow (Ethernet to each apartment, horrendously overpriced for what you get) is about 1/3 of the total. More people seem to like SBC DSL than anything else around here *shrug*

Each modem we have is hard-capped at 2 megabits a second (230-250kB/s) download, 384 kbits(35-42kB/s) upload and it rarely slows down. Even with both of our modems basically maxing out, each modem gets around 240kB/s download, and 35-40 kB/s upload. I'd personally rather have an aggregate 4megabits compared to sharing 2 between us. And yes, we both are bandwidth hogs a lot of the time

Why no servicepack? Working as a computer tech at a local store for the last year, I've seen more than my share of problems arising from installing SP1.

I've already got the cache set to 1GB on disk, set the drawing distance down to 128 metres, and I will try a reinstall tomorrow.
FWIW my ping is usually around 120-140ms, and even when its showing textures that I've already cached (ie, the network usage is very low, just enough to keep state changes going, not transferring any textures/objects) the framerate is still fairly low.

I hope that we can see some improvements in the future
This game seems to open up a whole realm of possibilities, and I can only see good things in the future. Just a few bugs to work out now

Mike

- SL doesn't use DirectX it uses OpenGL. Which means a driver or setup that works fine for a DX game won't necessarily be the best for an OpenGL game. To my knowledge Linden Labs is using the 41.09 drivers, I use them with no problems at all. I have tried the beta drivers (42.x) and they cause very bad glitches. However this is moot, it would take you 10 minutes to download 41.09, install them, try it to see if there is an improvement, and then use WinXPs driver roll back to get back to where you were. Then you would at least know it isn't the drivers.

- If you really see improvement in your bandwith with 2 modems then kudos to you.

- I have not seen any problems caused by installing SP1. But then again I have only dealt with about 2 dozen computers, not the volume you have at a computer store. Although I do wonder what sort of problems that service pack could cause. The only reason I have been able to find -not- to upgrade is for people running illegit copies, where the service pack won't install / causes problems that way.


I run SL on my laptop - 900mhz, 16mb GeForce2Go, 512 ram. It's my only computer right now. And I get Usually 15 - 20 fps, closer to 25 in empty areas, closer to 10 in crowded ones. From what I have heard this is normal. I don't really hear of anyone getting better than 30 fps right now, but I could be wrong.

Good luck and you aren't the only one hopping the frame rates improve.

I know a Mike Cook in real life... you're real name isn't Mike Cook, is it?

Well I'm running SL on a crappy old couple hundred dollar machine, just barely makes the minimum(in fact, lower than the minimum in some specs.. ), I've never done any overclocking or tweaking or anything, just 800mhz, geforce4 mx420 64mbram, 256MB ram, winxp pro. Works fine for me, after initial downloads are complete... .

maki

Heres a multi-reply!

Ama: While 41.09 may be perfect for SL and other OpenGL applications, I do use other Direct3D games and winamp plugins which are adversely affected by 41.09. As I stated, I did try the newer driver and it didn't provide any increase at all. So, I'm sticking with 40.72

As for your laptop, I'm quite suprised that you get such decent framerate. What tweaks have you made to the game, after say reinstalling it completely. On default settings(just after reinstalling), I get maybe 15-20 when I'm looking off towards the 'end of the world' across some small terrain, 30 if i am at the furthest reach of the 'end of the world' and underwater (no little glowing balls surrounding me to kill FPS even more) but when I start walking anywhere, it starts lagging down below 10.

Dave: No, my name is not Mike Cook IRL. I just chose it because Mike is my IRL first name, and I like to cook

Maki: On your machine, while in the game can you try hitting 'Alt-1' and then looking at the little chart that appears in the upper-righthand corner, to see what your framerate is? I'm curious as to how well its working on a low-spec computer

Mike

The only modifications I make are:

Set view distance to 128.
Cache to 1000mb
Network settings to 500, then to custom, then double the last two (objects and art). I too have 2mbs cable.
Turn the sounds down all the way (laptops do -not- have good sound).
Sometimes I will turn the Avatar Composite down a couple notches if I will be visiting lots of people, and maybe the object detail if I'm gonna be in Lindenberg.

As for the laptop ... it does have a faster hard drive than is normal for the laptop (5400 8mb cache, as opposed to 4200 2mb - had to upgrade after I triped over the cord once), but that is low end for a desktop. On windows in general I keep my hard drive defragged, and have a large (1gb) windows cache file on its own partition (so it never gets fragmented). Dunno if those really effect anything but.....

1. Don't OC your Vid card.
2. 512 view... dude that's is a radius! so your comp is trying to load and render all objects for about 4 sims! Thta would take something like a 5ghz. Turn it down to 256. I have a 1200mhz, 1 gig o ram and a 64 meg ddr GF2. I can get about 10 to 12 at 256 view. I suggest don't put it up.



Um... what's that... don't complain ... get a new comp.

Yes, let's ALL go out and spend a thousand bucks for a BRAND new computer, just for SL! I know *I* certainly have the money to spare!</sarcasm>

My personal best FPS is around 50-60, when I'm near the edge of the world, looking out over the ocean. During normal usage, though, mine varies from around 25-30 tops to around 5-6 when I've been travelling around alot, or if I've been on for awhile; awhile being 4-5 hours straight. BTW, my specs are:

p4 2.4ghz w/533mhzFSB
1 gig DDR333 PC2700 RAM
ATi Radeon 9000 pro 128mb DDR
SBLive!5.1 (Not that I actually have a 5.1 system, but I got it for the sound hardware accel)
60 gig HD
WinXP Pro SP1

I have the display settings set to have AGP on, local lighting on, shadows on... sometimes I have anisotropic filtering on when I feel like it. View distance 190, 1gig cache, texture detail, etc. set to FULL. The real key here is the view distance.

512 meter viewing distance is really what's killing you, like Nexus said. That means that your computer is trying to download and render sizes, positions, textures, scripts, lights, land size and shape, and avatars(which consist of many, many settings themselves, in addition to their own custom textures) in a sphere of vision that has a diameter the length of 4 sims (about 1.024 SL kilometers) around your own avatar. That is INSANE. To be able to pull something like that off with a framerate over 25, you'd have to, like, travel into the future, buy a P5 10.7ghz processor, GeForce 6 2gig TDR(Triple Data Rate ) video card, PLUS get yourself an OC-3 or something even larger for your connection. Until someone invents the time machine, I'm sorry, but you'll just have to turn down your view distance. I know it's hard, but.. It's the only way.

And about SP1... I have many friends who have it, and I haven't heard a single complaint from them, nor have I EVER had any problems with it myself.

Just to clear a few things up, the 512 radius I mentioned was only to demonstrate the slowest possible settings I could have used. My average framerate of 8-15 is with a fresh reinstall of the client, which IIRC is 256 radius, 5 composite, and the object/texture detail set mid-way.

Mike