What specs does it take to run SL really well?

We've got plenty of info on systems that labor to render SL right here. I'd be curious to hear from the folks that are able to run SL at high resolution, high framerates, and high quality (i.e., shiny, local, ripple, bumpmap, the whole nine yards).

Let's put a dollar figure on this, something we can all understand. If someone wants to really squeeze the eyecandy out of the grid, how much does one have to plunk down? The SL client architecture is rooted in 2003-era development, right? Surely there are systems out there that eat SL for breakfast.

My motive in starting this thread is purely selfish-- it will be time to get a new machine in a few months, so why not make sure its specs rock?

Thing is, unless you buy hardware in anticipation of stuff that's not released yet (like 1gb PCIe++ graphics cards) your computer is already obsolete.

I find the biggest bottleneck is your modem, you can have the fastest PC in the world, but if you got a bad connection, your getting 4 FPS regardless. This seems to be true of many MMOs out there, Second Life seems to be a relatively CPU intensive game, hopefully, if the last few updates are any indication, this will change. Once they start taking more advantage of the GPU, things should start running much smoother for people.

Personally I have a 1.73Ghx Pentiudm M (Thats the mobile processor so dont equate its megahertz to a P4, think of it like you woul an Athlon) 512MB of DDR-1 333mhz RAM, and a GeForce 6600 LE 512MB.

Normally I run the game with Anitropic On, Local Lightin On, Shadows On, Full Avatar Detail With Cloth, Full Terrain Detail, And all but the Avatar Detail slider maxed. Oh and I run it at 1360x768 (Widescreen HDTV 720p). I use Fraps to get a report on the FPS of my games, and it usually tell me I amgetting 15-25 FPS which seems to be enough to look smooth, though I would want atleast 30 FPS if I were playing a shooter.

Now lately I have been running the game with Local Lighting Off, Shadows Off, and Cloth Off. The reason for this, is that this is a Windows Media Center PC, and running at full power AND recording the Olympics gets me single digt FPS. However with those settings off, I get back to the teens and twenties even while recording curling (Yes curling, its strangely mesmorizing). When not recording I get a FPS around 30ish...

My render distance changes based on where I am, at home I have it at 128, at private simes, I leave it at 128, on the mainland I of course real that in to 64. I find that the modem is the bottleneck, as complex areas with a good server run fine, even with seversal people.

...

I plan to upgrade this PC some, by upping the RAM to 2GB, and eventully upgrading the CPU to 2.6ghz and the GPU to a GeForce 7800 something. One thing I am very curious to see if how SL would perform if I had a significantly faster modem. My cable provider is slowly rolling out affordable T3 access, and when it comes to my area I intend to try it, it will be interesting to see if SL performs much, much better with all other things being equal, I suspect it will.

Mmmm. Curling. It's strangely fascinating.

My machine isn't as impressive
Compaq SR1221RS
2.1ghz(i think) Athlon
512gb DDR RAM
20gb HD (original one broke)
128mb FX5200 whatevermacallit.
3.0mbps DSL from SBC (Dallas,Tx) - i consider this part important)
Windows XPro Minimalist Remix

I'm not gonna say it runs like silk in a nightclub, but it gets by.
Total Cost: $450

I found that my SL experience improved tremendously when I went from 512 of memory to 1 gig....

Yes. I've seen it happen.
I just can't afford the gig.
I'm a cheap bastard.

No matter what setup you have, it can be utterly spoiled by misuse of textures in the world.


Beyond that, I would have to agree that by *far* the largest performance increase comes from exceeding 1Gb of ram, presuming you have at least an 'acceptable' graphics card (say, Radeon 9800 series at least, which is ancient history really).

The difference between 512Mb of ram and say, 1.5 or 2Gb of ram is night and day. It's the difference between living in a wonky little reality-bubble, or living in a 'world'.

No matter how fast you can stream it in, if you constantly *have* to stream it in, you lose.

Go with the ram and whatever video card is the fast flavour of the month.

My own machine was about 1.4k, from Digital Storm. I can dig up the specs, but it was basically the "middle of the road" machine from their site.

Well when you have played EQ and EQ2 for several years you get tired of the big game expansions out pacing your computing abilities. That being said when I purchased a new computer in August 2005, I got rid of my desktop ( for mobility reasons) and bought myself the new Dell XPS m170 (also known as XPS laptop Generation 2). I did buy it with the future requirements of gaming in mind and the fact that it is a desktop replacement. I have been very pleased with the performance thus far.

I generally leave my render distance at 196, local lighting on, cloth detail all high..etc... this is for anywhere in the game, I never adjust for island vs. mainland, etc. My internet connection at the moment is DSL networked wirelessly. And both my partner and I play on identical computers at the same time with no discernable performance issues. I will say that our FPS was better when we were running cable internet service networked wirelessly, and we will be going back to that in the next week.

Pentium M 2Ghz (mobile processor)
2 GB ram
NVidia GeForce Go 6800 Ultra (dual graphics cards) w/256 inline ram -brand new card when computer was purchased.
100GB Hard drive
Audiology (sound Blaster) sound card
Windows Xp Pro.

We did run a experiement. As long as we open/load EQ2 first we then can minimize it in windows mode and log into SL and run them both simultaneously with no crashes or lagging in general performance. However running our network wirelessly begins to show some strain.

For anyone who has/did/still plays EQ1 or 2..one of the funniest things I read when I came to SL was a forum posting along the lines of "You know you are addicted to SL when...." and it said..."your family anf friends ask you to go back to playing EQ, because they saw more of you, spent more time with you offline when you played EQ" HA HA...I have to admit SL has become more addicting the EQ was...but am glad I bought my laptop to outpace the changes/requirements in EQ...it has served me well for SL.

I would also be very interested in what the minspecs are for 512 distance, fog of 4.0 in the middle of central Shermerville and a 20+ FPS with shiny turned on.

I can make some guesses based on my computer. I think that the main thing to improve framerates on my system would be a faster CPU. The other thing I think could make it faster is more videocard memory, to keep more textures in memory. I'm unsure if adding another gig of memory would make a difference, perhaps.

The 2.0 rendering engine is supposed to be multithreaded so I guess a dualcore CPU could do some good. So I think that something like an Athlon 64 X2 with a gig ram and a graphics card with 256MB+ RAM should get pretty good performance.

My current specs:
AMD 3000+ (2GHz)
10/10Mbit internet connection(I've never gotten more than 4Mbps streaming speed in SL though)
1GB RAM
GeForce 6800 /w 128MB RAM

I've set my draw distance to 160. Full object and tree detail. I can't turn local lightning on because then I get sub 1fps. Usually I get frame rates around 15-30. With few people and objects in a sim the framerate can get up to 60-70. Lots of prims or people will turn my framerate down to 3-10.

Ooh! Does this mean FPS will no longer be tied to connection speed & traffic? Or is that just wishful thinking?

And where did you hear that, by the way?

http://kexgodel.net/sl/th/townhall-cory-2005-04-27-edited.html



Still that only changes how things are done locally on your computer, so connection speed and traffic will still matter since that's what determines how fast the prim data is streamed to your computer, while the renderer just processes that data into 3D.

Does any improvement in hardware help with extremely slow rendering and extremely long lasting gray loading textures?

My machine used to do alright, but as SL revisions occur, it does worse and worse.

For an example, yesterday I went to a texture store which suggested you could see the textures in a box by right clicking and selecting open. I assume you are then supposed to click the textures listed in the contents. Well, every single one of the textures displayed as gray loading textures, and stayed that way, for as long as I could stand to wait before filing a bug report and giving up.

So I have a feeling that you can't count on being able to run SL well regardless of what your system specs are, it just doesn't work right.

Extremely slow rendering is a hardware issue. Extreme length of "cement people" is a sim issue (usually) related to connection speeds. There's not a lot you can do about it besides hauling your computer to LL and plugging in directly to their network.

I typically don't have any problems with lag or slow rendering, though every so often I get the grey with white grid. That's maybe once a month or something, and I gather it's a known problem.

Specs of primary system:

dual core Pentium (2 x 2.8GHz)
2GB RAM
Some video card that came with the Vaio, 128MB video RAM

On the main system, I have nearly everything bumped up, though noticed some performance issues with adding things like shadows and whatnot. Given I barely noticed the additions anyway, not much of an issue. Building is amazingly fast, and can keep up with any rapid adjustments and textures I toss in. I've even had Photoshop running along with SL, without noticing any issues with either.

Now, on my laptop things are much worse, but that's to be expected, ne?

Sony Vaio laptop
1.2 mobile Pentium
1 GB RAM
typical video, don't recall the video RAM

Building while on the laptop is possible, and I managed to lay the foundation building for a 16k sq meter project while on it. I don't think I'd do details, if I had a choice between the laptop and the main system.

I guess somewhere in between these two systems is the "average user"?

Extremely slow rendering is not solely determined by one's hardware. If it was, then my perfomance would be constant, since my hardware has remained constant.

You're right, it's a software issue too, but we don't have much control over that aspect (aside from switching from windows to linux, which I'm proud to say gives me a constant 22 fps versus windows which will dodge between 15-20 with the occasional 8 fps with virtual memory). Improving your hardware will resolve slow rendering issues however.

Dude. I'm so going to install SL on the UNIX box when I get home.

Well don't be thinking the linux client is a godsend yet. It lacks sound support and there's this annoying issue where titles are repeated twice over people's heads. As well, floating text is additively repeated per line (so eventually the last line displayd shows everything so far on the one line that stretches across your screen).

Addendum:
On the other hand, it's fast, transparent things look better, and I think the spirit of the draw distance and avatar complexity comes across fully in the linux client where as it isn't so obvious in windows. And hey, it's alpha, it's bound to be quirky still. But I could deal with the bugs if they would only implement sound.

Last weekend, I upgraded my Athlon 64 3200 to an Athlon X2 4200. Most other games showed a noticable improvement, but SL looks pretty much the same. Hopefully, the new renderer will be multithreaded.

I usually run with draw set to 192, local lighting off (since 1.7), shiny on, ripple water on and bump mapping with cloth. I average around 20fps in the Welcome Area with a moderate crowd.

Specs that mostly matter:

Athlon 64 X2 4200
ASUS A8N-SLI
2gb DDR400 RAM
GeForce 6600, 256mb (to be replaced with a SLI duo (eventually))
120gb SATA HD
40gb ATA HD
6.4gb ATA HD (old hard drives never die, they become secondary archives)

...and the rest

Good to know, I have a 2.5 Gig partition for my Scratch ATM (AKA Virtual RAM) I was planning to upgrade my Physical RAM (As Windows calls it) to 2 Gigs, glad to hear it makes a big difference, so that'll be the first thing on the system I upgrade then.



Before you do that, try this. On my old, slower PC, I set up a seperate profile for gaming (Cause HALO PC killed it otherwise) essentially I had it run in Windows 2000 mode there. I had all XP effect off, no mouse shadow, no themes, etc. This substantially reduced the Windows RAM footprint and got me about a 20% increase in FPS on Halo PC, and similar amounts for other games, like being able o turn on all the effects in Homeworld 2.

I would also suggest, though its not required, that you reboot your PC when switching to this profile, rather than just logging out. Additionally, kill all startup apps for it, and finally, if you use Nvidia, manually turn off the effects you dont want in its display console and force them to stay off in all applications.

All the same, I'd suggest trying the linux client at least once to gauge how far along they are. It's actually very good dispite bieng alpha.

i'm finding with the new patch that 1GB of ram just isn't enough.


anyway, here's what i think will make your life wonderful:

dual core p4
2 video cards (requires a special motherboard)
2 GB ddr2 ram

that's all you need.

although one video card like geforce in 7000 series or radeon x850 will make you content

oh yeah get a 21 or 24 inch lcd display.

I agree with mr Wu. A 24 inch LCD display really makes life good.

Although you need a powerful machine to deliver a 1920x1200 resolution at a high frame rate. You can try lowering the resolution but then the LCD monitor will try to stretch the display to fit the screen. This then causes a lower refresh rate because the stretching process takes time. Unless you choose to leave the display unstretched and that then that leaves you with big black borders and defeats the purpose of having a large screen.

So it really advisable that you don't get a high resolution LCD monitor unless you have a machine that can run it at its native resolution. A Dell 24inch monitor's native resolution is 1920x1200.

Also, when you first move to a monitor of that size. You will find yourself feeling a little dizzy for the first few days while your brain adjusts to everything being in a slightly different place from what it expects. That passes and before you know it, you'll be wishing you had a 30" monitor.