Do I have a bad PC?

Ok, my computer is about to drive me up a wall. (Or drive me to beat it against a wall.) I average 20 frames per second with all my graphics settings all the way down! Meanwhile, almost everyone I know tells me that they get at least 30 FPS, that they average 45 FPS, and one of my friends gets 50 FPS with his graphics settings all the way up. And I can't figure out why it is that I'm lucky to get a double digit frame rate with even moderate graphics settings. So if I tell you my specs and what-have-you, will you tell me if I have a bad PC and, if so, what I can/should do to improve it?

Video card: Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB
RAM: 4 GB
CPU: Pentium D 2x 2.8GHz
OS: Windows XP

And if there's anything else you need to know, ask me.

First of all I would not believe most of your friends are getting 30 to 45 FPS with the settings maxed..........I believe most, if not all, are fibbing to you. 30 FPS gives you smooth video..........same FPS you get on your TV. Your frames per second will vary quite a bit depending on what's going on around you and how you are moving your avatar and/or camera around. Go to 4000 meters and stand still, don't move your camera and you'll see quite high frame rates. Go to a heavily populated club with lots of particles and textures with a ton of avatars there wearing texture heavy prims, move around and move your camera and you'll see your frame rates drop drastically. Your internet connection makes a difference too. Background programs running. Anything that takes away from your computer computing stuff in SL will slow your FPS down.......plus lag you computer somewhat.

The specs on your computer are more than adequate for very good SL performance. I would not toss it..........the next computer you get won't do any better if the same things are going on inside it as what's going on in yours now. Try the simple.........reboot your modem and/or router. What is you ISP's advertised download speed? If you are on a DSL with 768 kbps download you need every bit of that for reasonable FPS's in SL. If on cable you should be at least 2 mbps........more than enough. If you are falling short call your ISP and find out why.

Test your speed here:

http://www.speedtest.net/

and here:

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

No reason you should not be able to get close to 25 or 30 FPS and mid range settings.....even close to maxed settings. Just don't believe everything you hear about people's frames per second.....most are exaggerating. And only giving you the "spikes" they see after standing still for a while. 20 FPS is really quite good for most people.

What draw distance do you use?

Are you noting your FPS in a crowded sim, one with lots of sculpties, flexies, twisted tori, etc.?

What settings do you have your video card set to in your nVidia Control Panel? Possibly you have them set too high there.

Right now I'm standing at 800 meters with one other person. My draw distance is 96, and my frame rate is hovering around 20.

What resolution are you at?

What's your ARC? http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/05/01/who-me-yes-you-couldnt-be-then-who-introducing-avatar-rendering-cost/

edit: you're not looking at 'sim fps' are you?

Your PC is pretty good. Not superawesome, but not crap, either.

The SL environment is such that unless you're in the same region, looking at the same thing, fps comparisons are pretty much meaningless.

Your CPU is your computer's weak point, but it's not really awful. One thing you might try is to enable the advanced menu (CTRL-ALT-D) and under "Rendering" check the option "Run multiple threads".

If your motherboard supports Core 2 Duo CPUs, that would be a significant improvement over a Pentium D.

Where are you seeing this? Empty sims are obviously going to get better framerates than some mainland sim that has a few thousand objects attempting to cheat the system by "temp-rezzing" objects that are, for all intents and purposes, permanent fixtures.



The first is probably sticking to object and avatar sparse areas, the other two are lying. To average 45 FPS, you'd have to run at 45 FPS continuously without ever slowing down. 50 just is not possible, there's no point in drawing frames faster than the sim can spit them out, and the sims top at 45 FPS.

BTW, your poll is flawed as it assumes that your friends weren't pulling numbers out of their ass to win a DSW.

I think you're confusing sim fps and fps. How fast the sim is putting out frames doesn't really have that much to do with how fast your PC can draw things. AFAIK, the client isn't fps locked - it will try to draw as fast as it can.

You'll notice the moment the graph hits 45, it shoots off the end and starts reading a rediculously high framerate. Now I know for a fact that a geforce 7200 on agp isn't going to pull 80+ FPS, especially when I can see a ~40-50 Hz stutter which would indicate that it's really pumping out ~45±5 FPS in reality. Just because you can redraw the same frame 2 or 3 times before the next frame comes off the sim doesn't mean you're getting a framerate in excess of what the sim is giving you.

Baloo, you know that you are not going to convince the gamer freaks of what you just said. I've had this same argument a number of times and it always comes down to "Peggy, you don't know what you are talking about so shut up". And, of course I do just that..............LOL

Frame rates are bragging rights. Anything over what the human eye sees as fluide video is wasting computing power.........inefficient and useless. Let the so called geeks fight it out. I'll settle for my 20 to 30 with an approximate average of about 25 all day long while my GPU stays nice and cool. They can install all that forced air/liquid cooling system and brag all they want.......won't impress me.

Wouldn't the speed of his internet connection make a difference as well?

Video can be made at 15fps and still be acceptable to the human eye. PAL is 25fps, NTSC is 29 (ish) fps.

There are many factors relating to what your system can cope with. No SINGLE one makes a really huge difference. This includes OS setup, RAM speeds, Data Bus speeds, HD controller capabilities, Network Card/Chip, Router, Connection (don't get me started on contention ratios and interleaving), even down to the condition of your electricity supply. Hardly viable putting a top of the range graphics Card in a system that has other bottleknecks. It is always a fine balance.

Given the architecture of the PC, you can develope a system that does certain things better than others, but don't belive the hype of any 'all singing all dancing' system, they don't exist. Certainly don't believe the much used 'Future Proof' systems, all systems are playing catchup as soon as they are manufactured as the next generation are already on the drawing board. Your total system is dynamic second by second.

Given that any multi-user platform is based on Multi-Casting, everyone will become effected by the base programme which is located on each sim server and those adjoining that sim (child agents).

Averaging 20fps is a good basis for any system using the SL platform.

Not to side-track the thread too much, but I'd like to address a couple of points that were raised. It seems there's some mistaken information floating around.


The notion that "30 FPS = smooth video" is a commonly held misconception. I'll explain.

Yes, North American analog TV's operate at 30 FPS (sort of), but that's only because our electricity happens to go at 60Hz. The apparent "30 FPS" we get is just a quirk of physics, nothing more. Analog TV is interlaced, so it takes two refreshes (interlace fields) to equal one "frame". And since it's analog, you get one field per one electricity cycle. 60 cycles per second, divided by two fields per "frame", equals 30 "frames" per second.

Digital TV can theoretically operate at any FPS you want, just like computer games can. But since 30 is already a standard, broadcasters tend to stick with that.

There's nothing inherently magical or special about the number 30 that automatically equals smoothness. Movies at the theater play at 24 FPS, and those look just as smooth, if not smoother, than your TV. PAL and SECAM TV's, which are what are in use throughout mos of Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, display 25 FPS, and they don't look any more or less smooth than our NTSC TV's do here in North America.

Here's the bottom line. For a motion picture to look smooth, it's not just the number of frames that's important, but also the content within the frames. The reason video and film appear to play back smoothly is because of motion blur. Objects that are in motion from frame to frame appear blurry within any single frame. But put all the frames together over any reasonable amount of time, and you get what appears to be a moving object, in clear focus. The blur fools our eyes into believing there's more on display than there really is. With sufficient motion blur, and certain other factors in play, even single-digit FPS can look smooth.

Real-time computer-generated video (games, virtual worlds, etc.), however, contains no motion blur. So it takes an awful lot of frames per second before the eye decides, "You know what, I don't feel like keeping track of all that. So I'm just gonna call it 'realistic', and forget about it."

One reason gamers tend to obsess over FPS is self-fulfilling prophesy. Gamers tend to believe from the start that higher FPS will equates to smoother gameplay, so they actively pay attention to it, far more than the average person does. As a result, their eyes become trained to track individual frames in a way that the untrained eye simply can't. To the layman, there might be no noticeable difference at all between, say, 40 and 45 FPS. But to a gamer, or to a video professional, or to anyone else who spends a good deal of their time actively engaged with the subject, the difference can be VERY noticeable.

For a comparison, musicians train their ears in exactly the same way. A non-musician might never notice if a guitar is slightly out of tune, or if a band isn't quite as tight with their timing as they should be. But the musicians in the crowd will notice every wrong note, and every misplaced beat, every single time.

So Peggy, when gamers tell you, "you don't know what you're talking about," from their perspective they're right. They've become acclimated to notice things that you probably don't. They could find a more productive (and nicer) way to say it, of course, assuming they're even aware that that's actually what's going on. But then again, if they were actively concerned with such things as productivity and social graces, they probably wouldn't be spending quite as much time obsessing over games as they do.



As others have already pointed out, you're confusing sim FPS and local viewer FPS. The two have no correlation whatsoever. The sim does not "spit out" frames to the viewer, as you seem to be inferring. There's plenty to be gained by rendering local frames as fast as possible, no matter what the sim is doing.

In fact, the ideal situation is for the client FPS always to be higher than the sim FPS, in order for SL to function properly, graphics-wise. But unfortunately that rarely happens, as we all know.

Here's how it works, very simply put. Sim FPS governs how often you receive new information about the contents of your scene. Local FPS governs how quickly you can move your camera through the scene to view the contents your computer already knows about. The two numbers are not in any way dependent on each other. Your local computer renders frames independently, AFTER it has already received the information about what's in the scene.

Theoretically, the sim could just send you the information once, never again to update, and your local computer wouldn't care. It would continue to render as many FPS as it wants to, as long as the objects it knows about don't need to change. You could navigate such an un-updated scene all day long, with your local FPS being infinitely faster than the sim FPS, since the sim FPS would be zero a that point.

For an easy illustration of this, ever get redmapped in SL? It happens to people all the time. You think you're still connected, you can move your camera anywhere you want within the scene, and your FPS is perfectly stable. But then you try to move your avatar, and you go "WTF?! Why am I stuck?" Then you notice your minimap is red, indicating you've lost your connection.

During that whole experience, sim FPS was effectively zero, since you weren't connected to the server at all, but your local FPS was completely unaffected. That should pretty well prove to you that sim FPS and local FPS are independent. It's only when the object information needs an update (like when you try to change avatar location), that you notice a problem. You need at least one new "frame" worth of information from the sim in order to be able to move the avatar to a different spot.

Once again, to summarize, sim FPS and local FPS are two different things. The former measures how often the contents of the scene can be changed, and the latter measures how quickly you can observe those contents, since the last change. When sim FPS is higher than local FPS, which more often than not is the case (unfortunately), the system will appear to lag. But when local FPS is higher than sim FPS, it's smooth sailing, at least as far as graphics are concerned. Make sense?

To fps? Probably not..

Even if the sim has crashed or you've totally lost your net connection to it, the viewer should be able to still render what it knows about the area. It just won't be getting any updates about changes.

That might be the case, but it still needs to be pointed out if only so they know why everyone else is laughing.



I'm pretty sure the framerate DSW is not a geek thing, but squarely in the realm of nerds. (Nerds being geeks minus the redeeming social factor).



I'm happy with 10 FPS in SL, it's not like you need ultra-smooth video for a usable experience in SL.

Not really, no. That affects how fast things rez, and would affect the delay when you're lagging. SLviewer assumes nothing in view has changed if it hasn't heard anything different from the grid.

Citation needed. As far as I can tell, SL isn't using multicasting (no mcast addresses passing the router).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multicast

Such limited choices in the poll so i did not vote.

But your PC is fine for SL.

Sorry, but that is exactly why a slow connection will have an effect on framerates. Whatever method you use to measure those frames may report 70 FPS but if your connection is slow enough 69 of the frames are drawn waiting for the next update from the servers. Your effective FPS is effected by that slow delivery of data. The only useful method of "measuring" framerates is what is acceptable to you and your eyes. The other crap is usful only for testing and looking for bottlenecks, etc in the software used for drawing those frames. And that also requires a controled environment to be meaningful. It's a matter of how many times you want the same scene drawn before the next update........and will it accomplish any significant improvement on your experience. For the vast majority using any graphically drawn images 30 FPS is plenty (actually quite a bit over what is plenty). The supercritical of FPS will know that's acceptable to the majority and they should also know what they consider acceptable is something they (themselves) must do to achieve that level. So, dispite my gentle correction by Chosen 30 FPS is considered smooth or fluid video......it's a standard arrived at quite some time ago and will likely remain the standard for quite a bit more time. Analog video is about to go into history and the interlaced video signal used to paint each frame is going to be replaced by a digital equivalent..........the 30 (sh) FPS will remain the standard (in the US......25 in the European communities) because of the cycles per second of electrical energy used to power most TV's. Alternating current electricity is not going to go away anytime soon.....and the cycles per second will remain the same as they are today as long as AC is used in this world.

Nitpicking 24 FPS and 30 FPS with minute detail is not going to change what is acceptable to the AVERAGE human being who sees or uses that video image. It mostly serves to show the world just how "smart" you are. I happen to have a working knowledge of both electrical and video theories (even the transmission of that video modulated on a carrier signal). I'm no expert in any of that (yet I do understand enough to grasp what Chosen has said...all true, but not germaine to the discussion here)......but then I don't go correcting someone on details that are not important enough to bother with for the average human being. If you want more than what the average user thinks is acceptable then it's up to you to achieve that........and you'll have to learn those details to do it. It won't make a spit ball worth of difference for the average user and they'll likely roll their collective eyes at your assertions.

Crystal clear. I could read yore posts all day. In fact sometimes it seems I do just that.

By the way I don't see how the OP has anything to worry about. The computer setup and reported performance is just as good as my own and that seems perfectly adequate to me.

Everything looks well, expect for your Processor. Its not really a huge deal though, unless you want peak performace. Alot of it depends on the area you're in as well. More prims, more textures (Complexed ones). The longer it will take to load and will reduce framerates.
I have:
Video Card: 9800GT 512MB
Ram:6 GB
CPU: Core 2 Quad
OS:Vista.
Uh, mainland usually drops me to 35 FPS on full settings. While on an Island, usually anywhere between 80-150FPS.

Hope this helps, good luck

You really should not worry about the frame rates others get from various places in SL since it really depends on all the elements around you when you check your frame rate.

Simple.. everyone exists within the encapsulation of the sim instance, every move, item, object, anything interactive, anything that changes, are all transmitted to every user (and those on adjoining sims) which is known as multicasting (mulitple broadcasting).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast

You're linking to the correct definition of multicasting, but SL runs exclusively in unicast, each packet gets sent to each client individually. If it were multicast, when SL is running, you would see traffic from 233.0.0.0/8.

I'm not really sure there's any way that multicasting could be implemented in SL beyond the standard music and video streaming applications multicasting is already sometimes used for outside SL.

Unicasting is primarily used in the SL platform for direct messaging, IM's, group notices, account information etc. Multicasting is used for the collective events that happen on a sim such as someone letting off a poofer, moving from one place to another, leaving and entering the sim. The sim software knows who is connected to that sim and broadcasts to every person the same packet of information. The same is true to and from adjoining sims.