Is my PC good to work with SL?

Hi everyone, I am noticing that sometimes when i play i seem to be having serious lag issues and then others not so much. A sim can be empty and i'm still experiancing lag and i'm a little unsure why.

I've jotted down below my PC specs, so you know what i'm running. My graphics settings in SL are all set too mid level.

AMD (2210 MHz) CPU
2048 MB RAM
Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3
NVIDIA GeForce 8400
Realtek Audio Driver

If you can offer any advice i'd be really very grateful

Thanks

It should be okay. Not all lag is the fault of your PC. Lag is also caused by issues on the server, and slow network connections.

Your graphics card is better than mine, but you would probably have less lag with a more powerful graphics card. With your card (and mine), a lot of lag is likely due to graphics rendering. So if the sim has lots of alpha textures, sculpties and flexi plants, it can be just as bad as a lot of avatars.

The first number is the year and the second number indicates how powerful the card is, therefore 8600 and up or 9600 and up would be an improvement for you. Bear in mind that this may or may not necessitate also buying a new power supply and fan.

If buying a new card is not possible, I find it helps a lot to adjust my graphics settings depending on the sim.

Also, you have 2 GB of RAM; I noticed a difference in performance when I increased my RAM to 4GB, which was a much cheaper and easier fix than a new graphics card.

I figured out a while back that the more files (and bytes) you have in your My Documents folder, the more time Windows is wasting indexing it, which leaves less HDD time for your applications. SL uses a LOT of disc cacheing, so anything that slows your HDD down is going to slow SL down. I had a lot of music files in a subfolder in My Documents, and when I moved that folder, SL sped up a lot. I also found that making subfolders in THAT folder (which is, in turn, in C:\) so not all those files will be in one directory, helped too.

Ok thanks, i'm glad it's not mainly my PC's fault lol. To be honest i can't really afford too increase the ram or buy a new graphics card. I'll get some more ram though eventually.

I'll try decreasing down my graphics settings a little aswell. I guess you don't need them so high.

Hi Naz, that's a great tip and i have alot in My documents actually i'll start moving things onto the main C:\.

I went from a 3GHz Pentium 4 with an ancient ATI 9000 64M AGP card, to an AMD 64 3400+ (socket 754 - The "original/ old AMD 64, from a dead 5 year old laptop) with an NVidia 8600 GS. The CPU is probably no faster overall than the P4 (depends what you're doing, some things it seems better at, others worse, but then it does run at a real speed of 2.2GHz I think), but the graphics card has allowed me to go from running everything at pretty much lowest, to having most things very high in SL

The 8600 GS seems to be a laptop chipset but there are some PCIe cards using it. The one I got easily overclocks to 8600 GT spec, and cost about £20 delivered, second hand.

However, SL seems to have random lag no matter how busy the sim is or what hardware I'm using.

well according too my pc settings my CPU is a AMD Phenom Quad Core Processor, not sure if that's good or not.

My Nvidia Graphics Card is a 8400GS.
Not sure if this offers anymore info but on my Nvidia Control Panal it says all this:

Driver Version: 191.07
Stream Processors: 16
Core Clock: 459mhz
Shader Clock: 918mhz
Memory Clock: 400mhz (800mhz data rate)
Memory Interface: 64bit
Memory: 512mb

Not really sure what half of it means mind lol.

Uhhh... Yeah... It's plenty good - considering that's AMD's current top-of-the-line processor!

Your graphics card is clearly the bottleneck in this system, so you should see a phenomenal increase in average client framerate by getting a higher-end card. But even as your system is, it'll handle SL quite competently.