Horrible performance?

Hi!

I just registered for a trial account,
and now I have a small problem.

Second Life runs horribly slow on my computer, now I have an ATI graphics card (9800) and read that Second Life has some problems with those graphic cards, so I wanted to ask if there is any way to speed the game up a little or is my only chance to lower the graphical settings to their lowest values?


Dalea

List what settings you have on and off in all your preference settings.

Describe the performance problems -exactly- (framerate is chuggy, hard drive is grinding, things just load slow in the world, whatever).

List more system specs, like RAM, processor speed, and such.

I won't bother telling you to buy NVidia next time, because you're a newbie, but just realize that it took ATI several MONTHS to fix their drivers even PARTIALLY for this game (yes, the problem was with ATI's drivers, and not the game), and they still don't work exceptionally well. That said, with the recent release you may be able to get -decent- performance out of it.

Can an ATI user tell him which drivers to use? The 4.3's? Or are those too chuggy to deal with?

Also, you shouldn't expect the kind of performance you'd get in a game like Quake.

SL's rendering system is completely different, and has far more polygons besides.

20 fps in SL is considered decent.

Unless you're staring into the simless ocean, at which point 45 is decent. Though pointless.

I have one of those package PCs, Medion it says on the front panel.
The add said it was especially made for on computer TV and multimedia.

Its a Pentium 4 with 2800MHz, ATI Radeon 9800 and 512 MB RAM. I don't know what else to list *g*

I tried out various setting sbut it won't change performance.

I have a TFT Monitor so I now am using these settings:

1280 * 1024 resolution, Drawing distance set to 190 and all those settings below that to maximum.

The performance doesn't change if I lower these settings (except teh drawing distance).
Also I selected everything in the display menu (like shadows etc) but if I turn those things off it won't increase performance either.

If I just stand at Morris with some people around me and talk it works fine but a soon as I move to an area with lots of buildings, or complex buildings, the game become slow and chuggy. I don't think the computer accesses the harddrive since I can't hear anything then. I also noticed that it becomes very slow when the connection indicator goes red but that is not always the case.

The settings I have now seem to be the best I can do compromising between quality and speed.

Maybe I am just too greedy with the settings *s*.
I will just keep away from places like the Olive Gardens *s*


Dalea

Like others have said, you won't get as smooth of animation in SL as you do in prerendered games. Everything in the SL world is dynamic, not prerendered. Anything can pop into existance or out of existance at any time.

The consequence of this is some speedup tricks can't be used that are with other 3d programs and games.

You can look at your current frame rate, as well as a lot of other information by pressing Alt+1 to bring up the statistics window. Any frame rate over 10 is considered generally tolerable for enjoying SL.

With that said, maybe you'd like to know what options to look at for speeding things up and making SL more stable. Here's the most relevant part of my "Lag Guide" that I hand out to people in-world...

These are settings that I recommend to people to get the highest frame rate and/or help avoid crashes:

For those who own an nVidia brand video card:

Under Preferences / Display tab:
- All checkboxes listed next to "Performance Options" are UNchecked.
- Avatar Rendering is "Normal"
- Terrain Detail to "None"

Under Preferences / Options tab:
- Check ON AGP Graphics Acceleration
- Texture Cache Size is set appropriately
- Set your video card memory size. (Some people have remarked that setting it one notch lower than your actual video card memory size can improve performance)
- Object, Tree, and Avatar Detail sliders are all the way to the left
- Checked ON Avatar Vertex Program
- Draw Distance to 64
- Bumpiness Draw Distance to 0 (10 is default)
- Max Particle Count to 256 (the default is 4096, you can also disable particles with < Alt-Shift-Equals > )
- Outfit Composite Limit to 5 (no idea what this does, I think 5 is the default)

For those who own an ATI brand video card, I recommend the following differences from the nVidia owners:

Under Preferences / Options tab:
- UN check AGP Graphics Acceleration (always do this for stability)
- Set your Video Card Memory to 32MB (but only if you're getting corrupted/strange/black textures)
- UN check Avatar Vertext Program (if your avatar is folded up in strange ways)

Note: Some ATI bugs were fixed in 1.3, so some of these settings may be ok to turn back on, but you'll have to experiment with them.

Hope this helps =)

Thanks for all the tips!

I am wondering, I read that tehre will be a new version out on the 5th? Will that run better with my computer?


Dalea

He's an ATI user, so would have to uncheck the AGP acceleration.



Probably not. LL is mostly finished with performance updates.

Just make sure that ALL your cache sizes are set properly, and that you've defragged your hard-drive recently.

You ARE shutting down most of those programs in the lower right corner of your screen, right? Things like download managers, 'helpful' things from places like RealPlayer (ugh) and such?