Ultra Graphics Settings

My comp has the best graphics cards etc, so with the release of the new viewer, i wanted to test how powerful it was, i put graphics maxed out on as many options as i could find, sl looked wicked, but in no way was it slow, im impressed.

At the risk of being pelted with rotten fruit, I'm finding the same thing. Everything cranked to the highest setting, some manually adjusted anti-aliasing settings in the graphics card preferences... and I'm getting lightning speeds that I didn't have before.

The only fly in the ointment is that I had my first memory leak crash this morning. That is an annoying bug.

For those of us looking for new computers - please post your machine model and graphic cards. Pretty please? with working tp's on top?

Same thing. Running dual 8800gt superclocked in SLi, have all the settings to the max, runs silky smooth and fine, only problem is.....

Running with the draw distance above 400m will bring the memory leak on faster in the 1.19 viewers. I was running 512m all the time with no problems on the 1.18 viewers. Even running it well under 400 I will still get hit with the memory leak, but less often and it depends on what kind of things I am doing inworld.



AMD 6400x2 Black
MSI K9N Sli MB
Geminii 2 w/Dual 80mm
4gig OCZ SLi Ready Ram
1T HDD (250g SATA3 WD 7200rpm MainDrive)
Dual 8800gt Superclocked 512mb DDR3 in SLi mode
Apevia 750w QuartzPower PS
Lite On "everything" DVD

I keep seeing this "memory leak" mentioned. Seems to worry some people, what is it please? (Keep it simple for a simple person.)
Is it one of the many numbers on the Statistic menu?
Love June

PS I got the 7900 Nvidia. a lot cheaper than the 8800, but I understand these 2 are the best.

A memory leak is a bug in a program that causes the program to not dump old bits from the memory, thus taking up more and more ram until the program eventually slows to a crawl and crashes.

Just for an oversimplified example - Say every time you go to edit an object the rotation values are known <0,0,90> when you spin that object to <0,0,270> the original rotation of 90 is "remembered" for one step in case you hit the undo button so it can put the prim back. After you make a couple of other moves the original <0,0,90> should be dumped from from your RAM because it is no longer needed. There could be a bug though that prevents this old information from being dumped and overwritten by new data. So in this particular example people tht never rotate prims or dont rotate them often would never even notice the memory leak, while a builder that rotatates 500 prims in a session would be plauged by it.

That is just an example, it can be any type of data really and effect a large group of people or a small group dependant on how someone uses the program.

In the case of the one I am seeing the client will start climbing up in memory used and when it gets to around 800mb-1g the client will start freezing for several seconds at a time and will need a reboot. If i keep going it will just eventually move on up to pulling about 1.5g of memory and either lock up completely or crash to the desktop. Which many times causes me to get DNS errors on relog until I reboot my whole machine.

Memory leak means that the RAM on yr pc gradually fills up with data that the operating system should theoretically clear but for some reason between it and the SL programme this doesn't happem. Slowly yr pc clogs up and grinds top a halt.

I use a small application called FreeRAM XP Pro and watch my available memory start at 1400 free and gradually diminish to 200/300. SOmetimes I can clear it back up to 800 or so but it usually needs a log out to revert to the original free memory before I start again.
Not much can be done about it, I believe, but no doubt others here can inform in more detail.

It's a sudden "not responding" or total crash, "running out of memory" error and other symptoms, its buggy software that fouls up the memory.

[http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/GAMER_INFINITY_XLC/]


I did upgrade the PS to 800watts

Sure, Talon. My machine is about 16 months old now, so it's not exactly new, but it does run SL very, very well. These days, you can get the same hardware I have for a lot less than I paid for it, or you can get the newer versions for about the same as what I spent.

I keep all my settings maxed, 512 draw, anisotropic filtering enabled, 16XQ anti-aliasing applied via nVidia Control Panel profile. On islands, I tend to get FPS in the high double to low triple digits. On the mainland, I usually get medium-low to medium double digits. And that's with Maya and Photoshop usually running at the same time along with it.

Specs are as follows:

2.66 GHz Intel QX6700 Core2 Extreme (quad core)
EVGA 680i SLI motherboard
4 GB DDR2 6400 XMS2 Extreme RAM
(2) EVGA nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX (768MB each)
(5) WD Raptor 150 GB 10,000 RMP hard drive
(1) WD Caviar 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive
Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Extreme Audio
12-in-1 internal card reader
Sony 16x DVD ROM drive
NEC 18x +-DVDRW RAM drive
Tagan 1100W power supply
NZXT Zero Aluminum Chassis
Windows XP Media Center 2005

(2) Eizo FlexScan S2411W 1920x1200 24" flat panel display


The machine was first built by CyberPower. The specific model of the machine, since you asked, was Infinity 1950. However, I now consider it to have been built not by them, but by me. The motherboard that came in it turned out to be defective, and although they did ship me a replacement for free, I installed the new one myself, since I didn't have time to send the whole thing back to them. When you change a motherboard, you're basically doing a full build. You have to remove everything just to get the old board out, and then put it all back. Once you've done that, you can accurately say you built the machine yourself. (Good learning experience if you ever have to do it.)

One key to the speed and reliability of this machine is the way I've got the six hard drives configured. The computer originally came with three Raptors, and then I added the other two, and the Caviar, myself. For the system drive, I've got two Raptors on a RAID stripe, so they act as a one 300GB drive, with double the read/write speed of a single drive. My data drive is another two Raptors on a RAID mirror, for constant real-time redundant backup. I use the fifth Raptor purely for temp stuff, such as my Photoshop scratch disk, my SL cache, video capture, etc. This keeps my system drive from getting fragmented by all the rewrites that caches and scratch disks constantly have to do.

The sixth drive, the Caviar, is in an external housing, connected via eSATA (eSATA gives the same connection speed to an external drive as SATA gives to internal drives). I use it for three things. First, it serves as another backup for my data drive, on the off chance that something happens to the RAID array to damage both Raptors (very unlikely, but it could happen). About once a week, I use SyncToy to synchronize the data files. Second, it enables me to take my files with me when I travel (it rocks with an eSATA capable laptop). Third, since it's got a lot of extra space on it, I keep my downloaded program install files on it. It's pretty rare these days that I'll go to the store to buy boxed software. It's easier just to purchase downloads. I do put them on DVD as well, just in case, but if I need to reinstall something, it's more convenient to pull it from that drive than to dig through a stack of DVD's.

I love this machine. I only wish it were possible for something like this to be portable. This room I sit in with it all day every day is nice enough, but it does start to feel like a jail cell after a while. Oh well. Can't have everything.

Thanks Chosen. At work I deal with mainly Unix based servers, so have dealt with RAID systems frequently. I agree with you your disk setup is great and I am glad to see that PC's are starting to get that technology. What my Unix systems always lack (because they are database servers) is video. So the video aspect of it I am finding fascinating.

The two 8800's you have - SLI'd? or is each one hooked to its own monitor?

As you know from previous threads I am looking for a great laptop to travel with me.

Separate monitors. It's actually overkill right now, I think. One card is certainly capable of running two monitors, so I'm not sure I'm really benefiting from having both in place. The plan originally was to have a three monitors, not just two. But since money doesn't grow on trees, I never ended up getting the third one (yet).

But every so often, I do switch to SLI mode when gaming, and then I remember why I haven't just pulled that second card out.

I did that yesterday to, and my old machine could hardly handle the previous Client if I had avatar detail, terrain detail, and trees...detail even halfway up. I hope that wasn't just a fluke.

Anybody who pelts you with rotten fruit because you are finding everything running fine deserves something from the xcite store shoved where the sunny doesn't shine!

Seriously, it's good to hear people are finding everything running well, you shouldn't feel bad for saying that.