Bad Performance on HighEnd Machine

Hello, Iam new to this great game but I have a very bad performance ingame. My PC is (i think) very good but the game runs horrible slowly and graphics are buildup very late.
Also I cant turn on the HARDWARE GFX OPTION in the PREFERENCES !?! Latest Driver on my machine for sure.

My PC

AMD 64bit 3200+
1.5 GB VESTA DDR 500 RAM
450 GB HARDISK ON SATA
AUDIGY 2 Soundcard
RADEON 9800 XT

T1 Internet Connection




Also I recognize no music in game!?! I hear sounds but no music. Sounds quite boring. Any help?

I haven't seen a "hardware GFX" option in the prefs, but SL only runs in hardware-accelerated mode. The best way to speed up SL is to turn off local lighting and set a reasonable draw distance. I have a P4 running at 3.3GHz and with lighting off and draw distance at 200 meters I run 1280x1024 and get 20-60FPS on average. In areas with a ton of avatars (that always drops FPS) I get about 10.

Other than that, the entire world is dynamic. SL doesn't get the benefit of precalculated BSPs or relatively small map sizes that let games like UT2003 run in high detail at 90FPS on this kind of hardware.