Frame-rate improvement

General suggestions thread. I'd like to try and track down the primary culprits of frame-rate degradation during _general_ gameplay. This excludes panning your camera around quickly.

The first one to leap to mind for me is Clouds. I was compelled to make this post when, sitting in my home at 300m altitude, I decided to turn off cloud rendering and got an instant 10 FPS boost. This was with draw distance set to 192. On average I get 10 fps with this. Dishearteningly, I know people who get 20 fps with their view range at 512 (Maximum).

Is there any better way that clouds could be rendered? Perhaps using low-res textures for them if nothing else. I don't know what the current cloud texture is, so I'm just poking around in the dark.

I get 15-20fps at the 320m draw distance... or one click above the 288m level. And the biggest hit to fps is particles, in my opinion. It seems the greater the draw distance, the greater the impact of particles. For instance, 4096 particles at 96m has little impact on my fps. However, 2048 has grat impact at 288m. Cutting particles in half yet again, to 1024, allows me to run at the 320m level.

A downside to larger draw distance is the rez-time when entering a sim. It takes anywhere from 15-30secs to get moving smoothly in a sparsely primmed sim, and nearly a full minute in crowded shopping-type sims.

back when i had my Geforce2GTS as my main video card i noticed FOG was a HOG ever since ive kept it as far away from me as possible, its the same principals as clouds

i guess it would help if i was rendering 300+m away from me, but i dont, i usually keep it around 64-96m (unless i need it like for planes and such)

my rational behind this is, well i cant see past 64m WTH am i rendering all this fog?

The differance in visuals, well instead of a blue wall of nothingness with fog around it, i just get a blue wall (and earned on average 5-10 fps depending on the situation) biuldings dont fade off in the distance as nice, but again who cares im not looking at them anyways

On newer video cards the difference isnt as great but if your trying to squeese every fps out of your machine it would be worth a try.

currently on my machine i have SL gfx setup as such

GFX enabled...
Ripple Water
Shiny
AV rendering normal
Terrain some
res 1280x1024 fullscreen

Adv Gfx
(128mb on a 128mb card)
Object Detail 50%
Tree Detail 50%
AV Detail 50%
AV vertex program enabled
Draw Distance 64m
Fog Distance Ratio 4.0
Drop DD if 0 FPS
Bumpyness DD 10m
Max Particle Count 4096 (on the gf2 i kept this at 2000 something)
Outfit Composit Limit 5

My current hardware (that matters)
Mainboard Gigabyte GA-7VT600
Chipset VIA KT600 (8237)
CPU AMD AthalonXP 2200+ 133mhz FSB +DDR (266)
(native 1.833 ghz oc abit to 1.9ghz)
1.5gb ddr 333 memory (standard issue generic ram, nothing magical)
PNY Geforce 6600GT 128mb AGP 8X
(stock speed, i havent had it long enugh to uber mod it like my GF2GTS)
A real netgear network card (none of this leech cpu cycles integrated stuff)
A real soundcard (sound blaster live, old model but good)
PCI bus is overclocked to 35 mhz (instead of 33)
AGP bus is OC by 2mhz as well (just tweaking without getting extreme)
(windows 2000 pro fully updated, with some reg tweaks by xteq's xsetup)

And what is my Framerate?

well in the welcome area about 25-30 fps, course this goes up and down abit in realation to traffic

@ my land in Jouppi bout 60-80 fps

and way up in the sky , heh well at 580m here is the result (this picture isnt doctored its just cut out and placed in a sl happy frame so i could joke around with buddys about how the framerate is totally unacceptable)

cheesefactory.us/evil_laugh.bmp

ps thats cyberflight you see under the info window without the feather texture