2 Fps?

I saw some posts saying that the posters regularly get 2 FPS or so.

How could anyone stand this?

Why would a person stay in SL with performance that bad? There are plenty of other places to chat, with vastly superior chat functions, so what would be so interesting about an essentially totally dysfunctional SL that would make someone stay with performance that bad?

LOL, I normally only get between 4 and 7 and it's no big deal. I guess if you don't know anyting else you don't know to complain?

If I drove a car for the first time and its top speed was slower than I could walk I might suspect something was amiss.

Well with my old system I used to regularly get 5-7 fps when I was at weddings or any gatherings with alot of bling, hair and huge dresses. Would make my eyes bleed to just be in those locations for any length of time.

Now I've upgraded my ram and it's like seeing a whole new world. Unfortunately that's not an option for everyone. But my suggestion is to upgrade your ram it makes a world of difference.

*huggles*

Ash

As they say "Ignorance is Bliss".

It's hard to stand single digit FPS, But i stay in SL because of the flexability and stuff i'm able to do. The fact is i have never seen a VIrtual world as good as this. My computer can just barely handle it. Usually my FPS ranges from 8-17, unless i'm on around like 3AM and nothings going on then it goes into the 20's.

Logged in tonight, first time in a long time and the lag has gotten worse. Well compaired to other online worlds with a million or so ppl in them.

Just as a somewhat related note, my computer has an Athlon X2 (64-bit dual-core), 2GB of RAM, and used to have an onboard GeForce 6100 (128MB shared RAM). I was getting an average of 4-5fps, and I upgraded by adding a PCI-express GeForce 6600 (256MB onboard RAM) and now get anywhere from 60-100fps. Onboard video is officially crap.

Heh i gues PC quality/power has nothing to do with it then... heres mine!
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (2231 Mhz) (32 bit)
Memory: 1023 MB
Video Card: GeForce 6200 256MB AGPX8

Aw man! It's the video card! 6200?? Go for a 6600 at least. 6200 is the Mom-&-Dad-just-use-it-to-check-email-and-surf-the-Net video card.

Not a bad CPU, starting to go on the old side, but its still decent.

More RAM is always good. Going from 1 to 2 Gigs of RAM makes a difference.

I have a 5200. Pretty much every game I want to play runs just fine
SL is a huuuge resource hog.

you can note also that most SL prim torturers obviously didn't follow a basic game design course or they would know its the sheer amount of prims they pack on a haircut that cause most of the performance decrease

With all the time LL spends developing fancy optimization tricks, they never thought about imposing an avatar prim limit, which would take all of 5 minutes to code, I guess, and would vastly improve performance

I have a 2.6 P4 with 2Gb RAM, and a 6800GT card.

I am doing quite well at the moment so far as fps goes (hovering round 10 fps), but I did go through a long period where if I reached 5fps I considered myself lucky. And that is with most graphics options turned off or down.

Maybe they'd invested a lot of time and money and effort and relationships into SL before it all went to shit?

I know my own framerate now is prolly less than a quarter of what it was in 1.2 and 1.3. And I've doubled my computing power since then. And turned off more options.

Judging by preview, it's about to half again.

My powerbook graphics card gave up the ghost earlier this week, depending on location I'd get anything from 5 to 25 FPS on it. I'm having to use my old 800Mhz iMac atm and it's a slug at 4FPS if I'm lucky !

High frame rate in SL is a luxury! It's also a skill, if you build using highly tesselated prims such as tori you have to expect a low FPS. And yes hoochie hairdos are the pits, but some of my best girlfreinds love them and I'm not going to tell them they can't wear them !

Another thing that struck me early on in my life in this world, is the early SL programmers probably don't have much of a games background. You know... single threaded client, occlusion culling only JUST implemented etc etc ! And that's not a criticism it's just an observation.

Well, im my case, that's part of the answer. Another part is that huge investment I made in 2003 to secure a lifetime account, and another is that I don't spend all my time in preview. It's not so bad on the main grid... or at least wasn't before this downgrade.

I'm on a Mac Mini. The graphics card is only barely capable of playing SL, and can't be upgraded. The best I've ever managed in SL was maybe 8 FPS (near the edge of a void sim), and the last several releases it's been more like 2 or so... I mean, the graphics often won't rez completely, the frame rate looks like a slide show... I know it should be better, but that my computer can't keep up.

So, why do I stay? Why did I even come here in the first place?

My friends are here. Some of them spend almost all their free time here. If I want to RP with them, I do it here, or not at all. Better visuals would be nice, but I came here from an all-text RP venue, and the people I play with are, for the most part, very good at descriptive prose RP. So it makes up for a lot of what my system lacks.

I've also become a content creator here. It's fun, even though I have a hard time seeing what I'm doing sometimes, even though I sometimes can't get a clear view of what I have built. But I can make things her that I can't make anywhere else.

At some point, I'll surely replace my computer with one that can make SL fly. At that point, I'll probably look back at my experiences now and say "Wow! That sucked!".

But for now, a little taste is better than nothing at all.

ROFL! Prim hair gets Gom'd! furrys go 2d..

Before this i was using a 5600 256MB. The card was always unstable, then one day it just went... 6200 wasnt expensive, and was a nice upgrade for me. :/ In a couple of months il be able to get a 6600 but right now im kinda cought in between things that require me to pay a bunch of people...

I think I can actually answer this question. I tend to get about 2 fps in a busy club but much more, up to 10fps or so, in quieter places... and that's with most graphics options turned down as much as possible.

The answer is: to participate.

People stay with 2 fps just to be involved in the incredible world and social experiment that is SL. SL is an amazing place for social, political, and economic reasons... and no, an AOL chatroom is not an equivelant substitute.

Think about what you actually do at a busy club. Every one of these things can be done at 2fps.

a) see what other people are wearing.
b) vote for which ones look best (either by clicking something or IM the host)
c) meet people and talk to them (or flirt or argue or whatever... but typing)
d) listen to music
e) tip the host or dancers
f) sit on a danceball, or click on something.
g) watch other people dance. I admit this one is iffy, but you can at least tell which ones are standing still and which ones are moving, and where in the room they're standing. Often everyone in the room is doing the same dance anyway. That's sufficient to figure out which person to IM saying 'you're cute, wanna dance?'.

... and what about the other things people do in SL, outside of clubs? Here are some examples. Think about them one at a time and say to yourself 'is it possible to do this at 2fps?':

h) buy and sell land
i) post on the forums about stipends
j) walk around and see interesting builds
k) build a house and furnish it
l) play Tringo or Quintzee or SLopoly or whatever
m) scripting
n) building
o) upload textures
p) make your prim parts say things to other peoples' prim parts
q) take a provocotive photo while your parts are talking
r) send the photo to your partner's 'partner' and enjoy drama in IMs for a few hours
s) join groups
t) sit in camp chairs
u) talk about Snow Crash and Lawrence Lessig
v) buy clothes, hair, and shoes
w) change your shape and skin to look sexy
x) set your creations for sale in a vendor, or on SLExchange or the other sites
y) write in your blog about a pretty sunset in (your sim here)


I could go on... but I'm running out of letters. Sure there are a few things like vehicles and guns that need physics... but the vast majority of everything we do in SL works fine on an almost-static screen. Even the fastest computers don't have photo-realism... SL is 'cartoony' for everyone, not just the 2fps crowd, so most everyone uses their imagination with the provided graphics (and animations) anyway.

Some people like paintings.
Other people like TV.

Hope they're not the "knee cap breaking" types

My fiance has my old GeForce4 TI 4800. She gets an Ok framerate. Nothing too fancy, but then she's hardly ever on. Barely remembers her password.

And like someone else said, SL is quite a resource hog. I have a lil' program running that shows RAM usage. Without SL running, I have around 1.5 Gigs free. WITH SL running, it'll drop down to only 900 MBs free.

OK, see what you can make of this:

. I get normally 20's-30's fps. Occasionally 40's, but hovering in the 30's on a good night. But I generally don't go around more than 2-3 people. This is with all but a couple of things turned off or down to minimum. (Just before Textures R Us moved, though, it was sheer molasses whenever I went there, like .4.)

. Once, a few updates ago, I got over 50 for a minute or so a couple of times for some reason. That only happened one night.

. After this update, I found myself at .2, etc., then bouncing up to 28, and back and forth like that. I turned down everything there was to turn down and turn off (which wasn't much left), and got back to my normal in the 20's FPS, and some low 30's , but not really 40's. Seems to have gone down about a decade.

Plus none of it seems as "stable" as it used to be - there is more jerking around from the twenties to 18 and lower, etc., than there used to be. (Again, no one much in the sim, except for a couple of friends for a while, who didn't seem to make much of a difference in my numbers.)

I did NOT update any drivers before this update.

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This is the computer I have:

Windows XP
Version 2002
Service Pack 2

Dell Dimension 4400
Intel Pentium 4 CPU
1.8 GHz, 1.79 GHz (don't know why it lists two)
256 MB of RAM

NVidia GeForce 3 Ti200

Charter Cable

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My question is: What is your advice about could I do with this same computer that would make a nice difference?

(That isn't too hard to do? I hate operating on the computer, and fear changes, which experience has told me sometimes make things worse than they were before, don't work as expected, or cause whole new problems.)

I'd like to get back up to where I was before this update.

coco

How does one check his frame rate? is there a display somewhere?