Need help with unplayable frame rates

Hi. I have an ATI 3870, a 2.5ghz AMD dual-core and 2gb of ram. Since the game reminds me of the Nintendo64 visually, I expected it to run pretty much flawlessly, however when I don't move I get 10-12FPS max and when I move, it's a 2FPS slide show. Sometimes it will freeze and crash out of sheer slowness. Is this normal? I've seen threads about people getting poor performance, but not with fast machines.

Another thing, how do we set a hard drive cache higher than 1gb? Thank you.

what are the full specs>>> SL >>> about

as well what are your graphic settings Draw Distance etc.

Nitpick: This is more of a virtual reality environment and less of a game. The visual quality is going to be a bit lower than most games you encounter because 99% of what you see was created by amatuers.

Because everything is user created, SL doesn't get the advantage of optimizing everything you see for a wide variety of video cards. Fortunately, 10-12 FPS is plenty usable in most cases.

Consider turning down your graphics settings, and turning up your bandwidth settings. Having a high draw distance on a slow connection will severely impact performance. Turn down detail on features you don't care so much about.

Make sure your video drivers are up to date. Consider using your video adapters performance tuning options, and tweaking things towards the "High performance" end instead of the "High detail" end.



It's not even quite a GB even, it falls short of 1024MB. Either way, I'd still like to know myself; modern hard drive technology is allowing larger cache sizes to pay off. Moreso when you frequently visit crowded areas.

Thanks, I'm aware that it's not a "game" but still, I thought it was a fun way to start by flying around and exploring the world, and even if most of the content is user created I have seen interesting-looking architecture and oddities.

But the abysmal frame rate is way beyond my comprehension, I'm used to running breathtaking 3d applications like Call of Duty 4 and Crysis with good fame rates and I can not see what excuse this world has for being so hard to run. In the end, a polygon is a polygon and a texture is a texture. As for the bandwidth settings, I don't think it can go higher than 1500kbps? That's not very fast. Actually it's quite slow. I hope that it is at least faster when you subscribe. My view distance is at maximum, since it's only 512m I thought it would not make much of a difference. So are all the other visual settings, I'm not used to lowering graphics, I'm the type to spend money to avoid this, but it seems that in this case, I'm the millionnaire aboard the Titanic. Of course, I have the newest drivers and everything is setup well.

The 1000MB of cache is quite absurb indeed, I have a download limit every month and it does not please me to have to redownload areas that I have already visited because they were cleared from the cache. They must make a priority of fixing this in my opinion. Another annoyance to me is the map, there may be a reason for this but why does it disappear and redownload every time I open it?

Another thing, anyone else has problems using the ingame browser? Mine does not display the videos and freezes often. Like, the scroll bars are inactive and if I change the window size it turns black and freezes.

And is there some sort of in-game notepad?

Thanks again for the support.

unless you are doing nothing (standing taking a photo) lower that draw distance to 128-256. and in very populated areas (like an 80Avatar full sim) 64 will help but you will still wind up with a slide show most the time.

"In the end, a polygon is a polygon and a texture is a texture" true but with call of duty its al the same over and over they are in a set parameter a box. Here every 5meters it may be a new texture that may have changed in the past minute, as well people upload to large of textures. or polys may change as you walk by (that is whats meant by User Created), I play COD and as you traverse in game, certain textures are the same used through out game play.. this is not true in SL

Now I don't know the specs on that ATI card (it is a good card I believe, but do remember as well ATI is always a little behind on Open GL), but 512 is a lot to draw that's why your walking into molasses when you move. (the downside is you have to allow stuff to rez in as you fly) remember as well unlike most games each sim you go to is another server.


adding sys. RAMM will help a lot as well.

edit>pref> custom and at the same time use View>stats in the UI menus

play with the sliders some different draw distances and quality settings watch the FPS meter on the stats, I set mine up like this and can crank out 40-60FPS in a non FULL sim. at
256 Draw and setting things like terain to mid and trees to low (I really don't need to see Linden Trees.) tweaking with them to get the best speed/quality combo I can.


When you find something you really like and want to explore more you can always turn up the settings (for photos etc.)


I also find running my bandwidth 750-950 runs the best (over running it at max, seems ther has been issues running at max (maybe they are fixed, I don't know)

and the SL cashe is a mess anyway the latest RC and main client I think both (but one for sure RC) isn't using it anyway!, its still re loading the textures from the server .. or if its not that its that the loading from the cashe is slower than it should be

You mean other than the fact that the developers have had time to go through every last inch of content and limit the system in ways that it's hard, if not impossible, to kill framerates?



Watch your bandwidth meter in the statistics bar. Setting that too high can also cause problems, as peak rates may exceed the bandwidth setting substantially. Set this back to default (750) and adjust up or down based on what the lag meter and statistics bar are telling you.



Which means you're having to download every object in a radius of over half a kilometer. A meter is roughly three feet, which means that you're getting every object in a 1500 foot radius, or roughly the length of a standard American Interstate freeway ramp. That's a VERY large distance. Note that this is the draw distance for objects, not land (I'm not sure what affects land draw distance, but I've yet to see the edge of the land draw no matter what my draw distance).

Most people run with their draw distance towards the other end of the spectrum, I run at 96m or 128m and that tends to be plenty bordering on too much draw distance (I'm on 8Mbps down/1.2Mbps up ADSL).