8800GT Runs Slow.

I hear of people getting 40 to 50 fps with a draw distance of 512 on Ultra. When I set my draw distance to 128 I get 10 to 15. With a draw distance of 512 I'm getting 4 or 5 FPS on Ultra.

I have an 8800GT 512MB card, 3GB RAM, AMD Phenom 9500+ Quad Core. I get the same results running Vista 32bit or Suse 11.0 64bit.

What can I do to tweak my card or the game for better performance?

Thanks.

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Ooops, guess I was wrong. Booted into Vista and logged on to SL. Enabled Ultimate then tp'd to the same spot. Getting about 25fps. In Vista I turned off Anisotropic Filtering in the driver. That may have made a difference.

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Darn it. Set my draw distance to 512 and now I'm getting 5 fps.

I've always suspected some of the high FPS figures occur when people are far away from objects, maybe staring out into a void sim, selectively reported by people who are trying to win at the game of "Who has the best rig?".

I guess I'm just a skeptical and distrusting person.

What versions of video drivers have you tried?

Have you tried things like upgrading your systems firmware?

Who makes your video card? and do ya have the latest drivers?

Where are you testing this at?

I was getting in the 30s at Gurl6 when I benchmarked it. That's the most texture-intensive place I know with any traffic.

I can consistantly get 45 plus in my skybox in Philudoria on my 8600 GT 256 meg at 512 draw distance on almost "ultra" setting......and between 20 and 30 at busy places.

Fluid video is 30 FPS.........anything over that is wasted since your card is simply drawing over itself anyway.

Ah, not quite true! Load up a game of Crysis with all the settings on High or Ultra High (Vista Only) and see how laggy it is at that FPS.

The extra FPS over 30 compensates for mostly online stuff like Half-Life2, Crysis, Battlefield 2, etc.

From everything that I read, the Quad core is a waste with games, though I have no clue if it may or may not actually be a negative on performance within games.

My 8800GT is 512 mg, so I'm guessing that the extra video memory is part of what helps me.

Definitely check to ensure your drivers are up to date. Even if you just bought the card and installed it yesterday, it has likely been quite a while since that driver cd was created and put in the package.

Next biggest thing is to see what else is running in the background on your machine and clear off the junk. Many people have so much crap running and just do not even realize it.

The card is an XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog Edition. Driver version is 175.19

I tested at Carver's Cove with no one around. . I play BioShock with all graphics settings maxed out and it's really, really, really fast!

I have very little installed on my Vista installation. I only boot into it for gaming. Generally I don't do Windows.

As for multiple core processors, I don't think SL is optimized for them. Multi-core processors are great for multi-tasking though. I can play SL, edit photos, surf the web and manage my music collection all at the same time without slowing down at all.

SL runs faster if you dedicate it to one core by setting affinity. I don't bother to do this because I'm lazy, but it works. Enabling multiple threads helps other applications more than it does SL.

make sure you msconfig is set to use your multi core prossesor i know vista comes set to just use it as a single core and you have to make sure it is set up to use the whole prosseor in my case i has to set it to run a duel core

How does one do that, Cristalle?

ctrl alt del and bring up the task manager. Select SL from the running processes, right click, set affinity, and pick a core (0, 1, 2, or 3). It's faster, but not so much that I would remember to do this every time I log in.

Okay, maybe it's much ado about nothing.

I am testing at Girl6. Standing in the lobby rezzing. Getting 20 to 22 FPS with all graphics settings maxed out.

Walking into the store. Wow, that's a lot o hair.

Ok, inside the store with a cute AV in front of me chatting. Getting 18 fps.

I guess SL was being a pain while I was testing last night.

I forgot, I didn't max out when I benchmarked... I think my draw was at about 96m or 128, no more than 160. I'd have to find the post with it.... but my laptop's mobile intel 945 got a whopping 4fps in the same place.

Just did that and it didn't change anything. I think SL just decided to be a pain right when I wanted to test things.

Oh, wow. I did not know that... Checking.

Yeah, Intel graphics, onboard, not great for gaming.

I didn't buy it for gaming. I didn't even think it would run SL, but it happens to do so passably well when I don't want to do much walking around.

I can get a whopping 6FPS on my 512MB RAM Notebook with a whiny little ATI card with 64MB from four years ago, with draw distance set to 128 and the settings forced to full Windlight glory....it's good for a giggle...
My 2GB RAM Vaio with NVidia 8600M GS, though....that can do an FPS of around 35 if SL isn't acting up.

Last night, in Ahern, I was able to pull down between 15-25 FPS, draw distance of 256.

I have a lappy like that. I don't even bother usually. I can stand still in an empty sim. Go to a dance club? No way.

you poor ppl
i get about 2fps at minimum draw standing in gurl6. its like a slideshow there.
the only place i perform worse is TRU.

Here's how to correct the situation
1) Buy a "Type R" decal
2) Apply it to computer
3) Find and apply a "racing flame" theme to Windows.

This will make your computer 35% faster.

Command please?