Lag reduction for parties/clubs? What's worth it?

I have a real PC now, but used to use a laptop, and so have empathy for folks with older/smaller setups trying to go to parties in SL. Yesterday I was at both the Forum Hangout,and a country/western club, each had a few things that struck me as very lag-inducing:

> texture swappers (slideshows, animated neon signs, profile displayers, thinC books that are in use)
> object rezzers (temp-rez decor, animated animals (like the Hangout cats), some games).
> avatar scanners (greeters, the profile displayer, and every host/hostess)

I don't include particle emitters or flexi, since we can decrease those effects client-side.

By contrast, I sometimes go dancing at a club that appears to be engineered for low-lag ... fewer textures, large open space with low primcount, single greeter announcing arrivals and departures, no slideshows/profilers, no scripted decor. When I was on a laptop, it really seemed to make a difference, but now I don't notice it.

My home in SL now is crammed with textures and scripts, and I worry about our next party because of it.

I'm asking for your feedback on whether you think it's worthwhile to set your place up for low-lag when having a party? Taking the Hangout as an example, a lot of lag items could be eliminated by simply stopping script execution in mod objects during the party. However, do you think that's worth it, given that the major contributors to lag anywhere are probably the avatars?

Of course one could study this scientifically with sim stats, but I'm posting this anyway!

Just cutting down on the number of textures is all you need to do for older computers. Set your draw distance at 64m open up the texture console and then go to those clubs and you'll see that to ones with less lag have significantly fewer textures (e.g. 1500 or less).

Just as a side-issue - laptops are not necessarily bad for running sl. I've never had any problems with mine (Toshiba Satellite x200), generally running with high graphics settings. Admittedly, it's a HUGE laptop - just the mains adaptor weighs about as much as a housebrick, but technically it is a laptop - it folds in half and goes in a bag (BIG bag!). It can be a bit flakey on wireless, but that's a separate issue.

From my own experience, and reading that of others, the thing that seems to make the most difference is having a good graphics card, and you can get laptops with great graphics cards (like the one I was licking in the shop last weekend before they asked me to leave ).

Not changing textures would help everyone wouldn't it? Regardless of your computer, not having another texture sent?

Also making textures the right size, if it's never going to be larger than 128 pixels on the screen, does it need to be uploaded at 512, which can be sixteen times the size?

Object rezzers obviously mean both more object info as well as textures for them being sent...

/me shudders

I've used both slow and fast laptops and none of them liked those things particularly...

Scanners though? They may affect the sim some, but I've never noticed much of an impact from them nor any change when people leave who use them.

Also, you can set your draw distance below 64 with RenderFarClip in the Debug settings, I was able to get double my FPS by just setting it to about 50!