Beginner plagued with debilitating lag

I'm intrigued by the idea of Second Life, but I find it incredibly frustrating and nearly impossible to have a smooth experience due to debilitating amounts of lag in almost all the areas I visit. I'm on a T1 connection, and my computer far exceeds the recommended specs. Any tips on how to alleviate this, or am I SOL?

the past few days havent been the best as far as overall SL stability.

A lot depends on what you consider debilitating lag as well.


Explain the problems you are having?

First, update all your drivers to the latest version for your hardware, and see if that makes a difference. If not, do the following:

Step 1. Turn down your draw distance.

Step 2. Look at all the graphics settings, and determine what you feel you need to see to have a good experience, and what you can live without. For example, object detail is pretty important, but tree detail isn't. Avatar mesh detail is important, but having the avatar cloth activated might not be.

Step 3. Incrementally increase your draw distance until you reach a whatever you feel is the best balance between how much you can see and how fast your frame rate is.


Beyond that, be aware that certain areas are much laggier than others. The problem might not be your machine or your settings at all. It might just be that someone in the area where your avatar is currently standing has a bunch of irresponsibly built crap all over the place, and it's lagging everybody all to hell. See what your performance is like in several different locations (both island and mainland) before making final judgment.

Try to go to less populated areas at first to get a smoother experience.

Turn down your draw distance in preferences. Mine is way down at 64 meters, so the world looks pretty foggy to me. There's also an ideal setting for cache size and network connections. I believe there's a good post in the Frequently asked question sticky at the top of this forum that has all the numbers for you.

Also if you're trying to move, just tap the keys gently and wait for something to happen. This keeps you from running into walls and other people and is less embarrassing.

With my low memory, I have to clear my cache after visiting a shop with a lot of textures. This however increases the amount you are downloading on your next log in, but it's the only thing that works for me.

All this sounds grim, but I really enjoy SL anyway.

CTRL+p and lower your draw distance.

Yikes! I perused the FAQs above and discovered the average framerate in *good* areas to be 10-20 FPS! I suppose the choppiness is something I'll just have to get used to, but its rather annoying since I'm used to dealing with framerates in the 30s and 40s.

with my system I get about 35-45 on average. However, even with my specs in clubs and such it can crawl down to around 5 or so if its packed (Ultimate setting, draw distance at 200)

My specs:

Quad core Processor currently overclocked to 4.2 GHz
2 gigs of high quality RAM
350 gig, 15000 RPM Hard Drive
Windows XP Home
300$ graphics card (I don't remember what it is at the moment and not with my info lol...oops)



So I expect pretty good performance from just about everything I do.

For the average user, if things are still rezzing you can expect probably around 20-30 FPS at any given time (Not tons of thigns rezzing, just it finishing) and peak around 32 FPS by my judge. various other thigns slow it down too, like # of people, # of scripts, # of particles, # of textures, # of prims, # of sculpties, graphics settings

Basically what I was asking.

Definitions of Lag are variable.

What you'd consider debilitating, I'd consider lag-free.

Debilitating to me is 3-4 Fps.

wow ouch o.o

Realize, too, if you're used to 30-40 fps all the time, I'd venture to guess you're comparing your SL experience with some other game-oriented MMORPG such as World of Warcraft. Remember, WOW and similar "worlds" are pre-built by the game developers and all areas are pretty much static. SL, on the other hand, is a constantly changing, dynamic world where things have to be downloaded to your machine as you enter each area. As well, any other avatars in your vicinity tend to create a lot of bandwidth as they move around, dance, use AO's to look sexy while they stand, ad nauseum.

As the earlier posters pointed out, your experience will be dictated to some degree by hardware, but moreso by the amount of activity, prims, textures, etc. within the area you are standing in. I run SL on a single core laptop with a marginal (128 MB) graphics card and can still obtain FPS in the low to mid 20's in a quiet area, after everything loads in.

Clubs drop me down into the single digits very often.

A lot of people who use SL are not gamers, they just have normal and likely obsolete computers.

I think lots of people spend more time in the 10-15 fps range. At least from talking to people.

A good chance more people do that than those who average 30+

I know, I honestly was just shocked that you get 4-5 FPS.. I would stop what I was doing to try and fix it...I'm just not used to it though, so yuh...

Also unless you absolutely have to see the pretty sparklies..disable particle count to 0..disable streaming music..disable streaming video...turn off shininess and avatar vertex shading..make sure that avatar mesh is set to medium or low..same with trees and/or land..set to low.

These are things I do to insure a smooth ride.I also make sure that lights are moon and sun only(not local). I try to make sure that Im not working my game too hard..and at the same time someone told me tht dumbing down your video card is bad as well..so..finding out the appropriate card MB is good too i think..

(I run sl on an unsupported ISP...so..I've been tweaking my system for years to make sure that it runs smoothly.) Usually i dont have any troubles but yes..this last week has been particularly bad.

I'm sure that if some of the things I suggested have nothing to do with framerate..they will pipe up and say so

~Lana Tomba

I built a club that for me averaged 20 fps empty.

A lot of people complimented me for the low lag setting even when we had a dozen people in in it.

Course a lot of the lag is the result of traffic, and thus it creates more lag in a snowball effect.

And without traffic your club is just a money pit ..

I'm usually 10-13

I consider debilitating 3-4

thats a bit different thing.

okies thats better then lol..still..ouch...

Im a bit scared to try windlight since its supposedly worse.


Definitely SL must be really really slow with the supposed minimum requirements.

Well. for m,e at least WL actually runs faster, even with more options and better graphics.. I'd recomend try it at lowest settings and see what happens... if it hates you then never touch the icon again =P

LOL i just looked them up

Not only do I exceed the minimum requirements, I exceed the Recommended requirements.

AND I turn my settings down quite a bit, 64m draw, etc

And i have a very good connection.

My frame rate is about where it was 2 years ago with my older computer. So much for progress.

not trying to highjack this thread but how do i add a jpeg for my avatar?

~Lana Tomba

Being a land owner, my biggest pet peeve is complaints of low FPS by people with aging systems or unoptimized settings. For example, I average about 15-25 FPS on the ground on mainland with all the windlight goodies turned on. Much higher with the regular client. I do keep my draw distance set to about 80m so that helps alot.

The biggest drain on my system is other avatars. Especially those with 300 prim flexy hair. One guy that comes often to my land has so much crap on him he literally cuts my frame rate in half. Any way to the OP, you should play with your graphics settings in SL, especially the draw distance. If this doesn't help, then I would recommend considering an upgrade.

/me DROOLS over 15 fps rates... I typically get 5 on a good day.

See this link http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/11/15/typical-frame-rate-performance-by-graphics-cardgpu/

my problem is my graphics card... its one of the lowest listed by LL. I have 3 gig of memory, and an otherwise pretty good machine, its just a crap card in terms of Second life..

Santa... I have been a really good girl this year.. please please send me a GEforce 8000 series... pretty please?

imogen

From the "User CP" choice on the blue bar at the top of the page, choose Edit Avatar.

As for lag, yeah, 40 FPS is just possible for me on my best machine under ideal sim conditions. But I really see very little difference between about 15 and 40. Under 15, the decay is rapid, to my senses.

Also, I can support the observation that WindLight needn't always slow things down; the new graphics preferences panel is quite good IMHO as a single place to adjust (almost) all graphics settings, so it's somehow easier to dumb-down the stuff that doesn't matter so much.

One other thing I'd mention is that your graphics card drivers probably have some kind of control panel of their own to control anti-aliasing and other GPU voodoo magic. Some of those settings can *really* slow down OpenGL-based applications like SecondLife (especially if they were accidentally mis-adjusted while tweaking a DirectX application).

I keep my draw distance at 64m unless I'm doing photgraphy. Frame rates are generally low at busier places.


If you want really good performance, make yourself a sky platform at, say, 600m above a sandbox and you will see that movement is fluid and realistic, especially if you have an AO (animation over-ride) that gives you a nicer walk than the standard SL stumble!