What do I need for greater (smooth) Draw Distance?

On the mainland I find 200m is a nice draw distance that gives me a nice and smooth SL experience.

I can bump it up for the max (512 isn't it?) if I need to see something from a distance but it's not really enjoyable to work with.

My machine is a Intel Quad Core running at 2.9Ghz with a 8800 GTX Graphics card.

So, Pretty basic solid stuff you might say.

I was wondering what I'd need to do to be able to have a smoother experience at a higher draw distance?

If indeed you can (perhaps it's bandwidth time as more of the SL world has to download?)

Might a new CPU be the limiting factor?
Or a new GTX Graphics card (albeit I hear some people with the new GTX 275, 285 etc are finding things worse than the 8800 cards)

Or perhaps neither will as I just can't get the data from linden fast enough to make it smooth no matter what.

I'm on a 20mbit cable line in the UK

I could do a "Speedtest.net" test if I know (roughtly) where Lindens machine are (just out of interest) to see my "normal" download speed fromthat part of the world.

The object and texture download speeds are severly clamped from SL.

A lot of the work they've done to distrubute asset load has actually slowed down it's total aquisition time considerably. (There were some individual improvements with culling but overall it's still a lot slower)

DLing textures and getting them onto the graphics card severely lowers overall frame rate.

That coupled with the fact that as you increase your draw istance you geometrically increase the necessary object and texture downloads, the problem gets bad FAST.

Once youve loaded and cached EVERYTHING, it should speed up for you again (Frame rate doubles or tripples for me when that happens), but then when you TP somewhere, WHAM, you (and the sim!!) will stall out badly again.

My 9800GTX+ with 512 VRAM and Intel quad core lags with 512 draw distance in a texture rich invironment........256 works much better (256 is the distance of a single side of a full sim...........so it's a pretty hefty draw distance considered in that light).

If you want to test your download speed for a server used by LL try San Francisco. They do have a co-location at Dallas (unless they's shut it down lately) too. I read recently that they have server locations in Europe too..........but I can't remember where. Or even if that is true.

How much ram do you have? What operating system?

What quality setting do you have?

What FPS do you get?

The info you need to do a speed test with is shown in the Help About Second Life dialog.


You might try the various alternate viewers.

Increasing ram might help.

Dual video cards might help.


Switching from 32 bit to 64 bit operating system might help. (perhaps)

Do you get much visual benefit from going from 384 meters draw distance to 512?

Increasing draw distance is the fastest way to slow down Second Life.

Your frame rate also depends on the area you're in. Good luck ever getting 40fps flying around Bay City with a 512M draw distance.

I upgraded from a 512MB 8800GT to a GTX260, and yes it is faster and works great. Places like Chakryn forest that really strained the 8800 are much better. However, I usually only run the draw distance up to 512M or more for snapshots.

One other thing to consider is that longer draw distances use a lot more memory, and you will experience more crashes as you excede the limits of the 32-bit program address space.

running under Windows 7RC. For about the first week after I installed it, SL only recognized 368MB of the 896MB of memory on the card. Then it started seeing 512MB which is as much as the current viewer recognizes. I have no idea why that happened or what fixed it. Under Windows XP x64, SL always recognized the full 512MB.

Thanks for replies so far.

I have a Nvidea 8800 GTX 768MB

I HAD an Nvidea 8800 GTS 320MB

Swapped it out as it was a cheap 2nd hand deal and thought the extra memory on board would help. To be honest it made little (if any difference)

As I said, I'm running an Intel Quad Core CPU and 2.9Ghs and I have "run multiple threads tuned on" and all 4 cores are running when I run Second Life and There is only about (guess as I'm not looking at them right now) about 25% to 30% loading on all 4 cores all the time.

Running 64-bit Windows7 (the official trial version) with 8GB of main system RAM.

20 Megabit cable internet from the UK (Virgin Media)

Running SL in a Maximised Window on a 24" widescreen 1980x1080 monitor.

Graphics settings I will have to go over later, but all pretty high.
I have water reflections off, most other things where you expect the defaults to be for my setup. Draw Distance I normally set at 200 as seems to show me all I need to see.

Looking out to sea (on mainland) the SL client gives me about 60fps and looking inland can be about 40fps (just standing still, all textures loaded)

If someone can give me a stop to go to and something to look at I can get a comparison figure.

I think you're doing pretty well to get a smooth experience with 200m draw distance, myself.

Well, when I say "smooth" I don't actually mean "SMOOTH" in that if I rotate on the spot it glides round like a Ice skater travelling across a petroleum jelly covered mirror!

It does "step" round if you like, but not enough to spoil things, but there could easy be another 1, 2 or 3 frames between each of my steps to make it SMOOTH in big letters

I know there has in the past been a texture cache size on your hard drive argument, but if LL are changing things at their end, then perhaps reasons for fiddling with the cache size might change also over time?

Oh yes, I have 4x antialiasing on. but the ansotropic (or something like that turned off)

Given that my 4 cores are only having a (guess cos I'm not looking at them right now) 25% to 30% loading. I was wondering if a faster CPU would make any difference?

Or perhaps it does not work like that with CPU's ?

Id get an i7 Core system with a new graphics card BUT I'd be well upset if it didn't make any difference.

Again, we need some scripted thing in a area of SL where we can in some way test our setups against others. I know there are too many variables, but there must be something.

Even if its spinning on the spot at a set location and viewing smoothness?

Getting a faster CPU, video card with more onboard RAM, faster system RAM will only go so far to make your video smooth in SL. If you have all the fastest, bestest, most efficient hardware in your computer, properly installed and configured that would take your system out of the equation as far as "smoothness" of video is concerned..........for the most part since nothing is perfect. But, it does nothing for how the data is delivered to that super system. Your ISP, even at 20 mbps, can hiccup or be much slower than that advertised speed. How the internet routes all that data being sent back and forth between you computer and the servers of LL's (ping time). Your modem, router, cables (if hardwired), how long the cables are between those devices, and any number of things (parts, connections, devices, etc) will effect what finally arrives to your computer.........most of which you have little, if any, control over.

Your system appears to be doing pretty darned good. 200 meter draw distance is not bad, 40 FPS is pretty darned good. I'm not sure what you are wanting. Very few computers can take the 512 meter draw distance and not show some degradation. And a lot of that degradation is not generated in the computer anyway.