How to make SL run faster/smoother? Computer spec needed?

A few months ago I put a new PC together.

Intel Core2Duo 2.4Ghz
2GB Memory
Geforce 8800GTS Graphics card with about 320MB of memory on board.


And SL looks great, I've tweaked my graphcs options to try and get the right balance of quaity/performance, and I've just about got all the fancy things on (even water reflections) now and it's just about ok.

But it could be better (more frames/sec)

As a test, I have just overclocked my CPU from 2.4Ghz up to 3Ghz (a 25% increase) and whilst windows benchmarks and similar items show a good increase, Second life was just the same.

I took a few views from certain point with the statistics bar up and wrote down the fps figure I was getting.

So, a 25% increase in CPU speed has made practially zero diference at all (supprisingly)

Also, I'm on a cable internet connection which is at 20 Megabit speed, and that's about as good as it gets in home in the UK.

So. what do I need to do to make a DRAMATIC difference.
Say something like 50%+ in fps in game.

I'm running XP (so Vista is not sucking power away from my machine)

I could get a quad core CPU, but would there be any point?

More memory. Upgrade to say 4GB (although I know I will only see about 3.2 of it under XP 32-bit)

Or, is the entire issue a graphics card one?

Looking at normal "gaming" benchmarks, whilst the top end cards are a bit fater than my Geforce 8800 GTS they are not exactly ball bustingly faster.

I'm open to any suggestions and would welcome any advice as to what's the best I can do to give me more fps in Second Life.

Thanks.

What kind of framerate are you getting now & what's your draw distance set to?

There is an option called "Run multiple threads" in the rendering section of the advanced menu that may help. If you don't see the Advanced menu, CTRL-ALT-D turns it on. I think.

Thanks for that.

I didn't know about the Advanced menu, so I tried your suggestion about Multiple Threads, but it made no difference

Anyway, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here's a picture showing you everything.
So can see my settings and framerate etc etc, when looking over quite a complex scene in the distance with many trees.

What is your draw distance?

What kind of frame rates are you getting now?

What is the differrence from being inside a closed area vs. out in the country?

Your setup is about as good as you are going to get. Maybe you are just reaching the limit from the SL end. That is, they are feeding you data as fast as they can. Doubling everything at your end won't make them any faster.

Here's something odd.

I just tried full screen as opposed to windowed mode and that made no difference in my fps figure.

I then thought, I know what I'll do, and I dropped the rez down from 1600x1200 down to (a quarter of that) to just 800x600

And guess what.

Nope, no faster!

So, overclocking my CPU by 25% makes no improvement.
Reducing the screen res from 1600x1200 to 800x600 makes no improvement.

So, dare I think it's just the client that we're using that's the bottleneck here?

It's seeming like nothing will make any improvement.

Or am I missing something important here?

I'm not sure what the BANDWIDTH 130kps means in the top right performance box.

!'m Assuming that means I'm pulling data in at 130 kilobits/sec. As opposed to my theoretical max of 20 Megabits on my cable internet connection.

Is this the thing that's limiting me?

I could understand that if I was moving, but I'd have thought once stationary with almost nothing moving in my field of view it would speed up a lot.

I discovered the other day (accidentally I should add) that if I run SL on a non-maximised screen it runs smoother for me.
May not work for anyone else, but I thought I'd share.

Reduce your draw distance to 128 meters. That's plenty for most situations, it will improve your frame rate, and you can increase it for special occasions.

Yes, it's normally been on 128 since day one.
I only increase it when I'm looking for somethign far away

I was trying to see if I could tweak the distance out without loosing too many frames.

I found I could go from 128 to 200 and my frame rate changed from about 40 to 34 or 35 in certain situations. so I was running at 200 for a change.

I can get 22-40 at 224 draw with all set to high{Ultra} I also set particles about where your at 4000+ pretty close to the same I bet. (but I kill that reflection all to none {it really unless for a picture or occasion makes no sense to me}water reflection that is) on a 7900GT 256k (specs in sig) thats a decent pic, (I also found that unless I am wanting to take pics or see Linden trees setting that to LOW makes up about 10-15 FPS as well, if you can handle really bad trees!) SL and the client is a bottle neck if you ask me, there are lots of things to tweak as well, in the hardware tab and in Nvidias Control panel as well... I use Torleys set up (antiAlis etc. max... then had issues with a mirror-reflection bar (Jira something #) on the right of my screen had to set it software controlled.. to fix) one day hopefully the UIs will catch up with what we can do and allow lower end users to still see/use as well...
I also found window or full screen makes no diff. Unless I am running one of my old pcs/cards (FX 5200 and some 4000 thing lol) or the lap top 945intel full makes it work and adds about 5FPS..

I haven't tried Over clocking as I don't think I'm going to get it from the server anyway! so why burn this card up before SL can run the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 right now im at a 4,000 #D mark with that one 13,500! man if SL could do it, of course I would need a heck of a lot more CPU I think as well... maybe even get the OS that will read the 8 G ramm I have sitting in there !

my window is also non max its close but I leave abour 1 cm on the bottom to watch fire fox

EDIT well something has changed in the last month!!! I run the RC always have.. what UI are you runnung? and would you share that view with me so I can see where I stand at the same view? I used to get what I said above on my main land plot about 1/5th of the some on the border seeing some add farms and other mess as well depending I'm now sitting at about 12.5 FPS (usability s the same it seems as I hadent noticed, but rez time is slow *has been a while now lots of grey! ... ... but I did get what I said above maybe a month ago before RC went standard 1.20... now I'm mad LOL

So my guess is your doing great with the aggents and child agents as welll!
nice

would lov to go t o the same spot and try and tweak this card some as well! better than it was (I'm running the RC again maybe I should go wth the released client, and I run windlight (although believe it or not woth my darker settings and fancy colore d cloudes/stars full bright I get better FPS than midday standard!

Second Life uses virtually no client side resources to render it's world, apart from the odd objects in the cache which is also rather poorly implemented.
This is why it becomes slow. It has got nothing to do with being "heavy" on your hardware, really. If you'd be able to host the resources locally, it'd play out as smooth as Wolfenstein 3D would on a modern computer.
So it's really the CAD-like rendering system that makes it go slow.

Second Life ain't a good example on good coding or implementation, I can tell you that. But it works and is still the pioneer in semi-VR environments.

SL is light on the CPU, due to physics being calculated server side, which is why you don't see any difference after overclocking the CPU.

It is, however, heavy on the GPU, as all rendering must take place client side (nobody has the bandwidth to do server side rendering).