Horrible FPS, why?

Okay, this is my new machine :

- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
- 4Gb DDR2800
- Dual NVidia 7950GX2
- 2xWD 74Gb Raptors in Raid 0

Now how does SL manage to always hover between 15-25 fps in most areas? And it actually claims it's spending 60% of it's time rendering. Something is horribly wrong when the system above runs the most demanding games around 50-100fps, and SL at a fraction of this. It almost seems as if network performance has an impact on FPS..

As always, the 'weakest link" theory applies to anything you are doing on the net - particularly in regard to the huge resource monster we all know and love/hate/love called Second Life.

If you are getting 15-25 FPS on busy sims with lots of content and tons of scripts runing, that is probably better that alot of people are getting. On an empty sim or well managed sim, you should be getting much, much higher FPS with that setup. Assuming you have a hot, fast connection.

Great hardware and setup. However, you did not provide your internect connection - type and bandwidth/speed.

your monster machine and SL experience may, therefore, be limited by your internet connection.

Test your connection speed, both down and up. Speakeasy is a very good site.

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

I just ran a quick test. Sometimes a little faster, but this looks pretty good.

Last Result:
Download Speed: 8199 kbps (1024.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 712 kbps (89 KB/sec transfer rate)

Good luck !

Tried setting affinity to 1 core?, 2 cores give me a fps drop in SL, go figure.

SL is veeery poor on fps if you have 10+ avatars near you in sight, so fps vary crazy depending on content you can see.

'Cause SL isnt a game ,
its not buildt like one, couldnt be further away from it.

Games are optimized to be fast and have everything you need on it, hides thing you cannot see and doesnt render what you dont need and that will give you alot better performance, they also doesnt have about billion textures in insane large sizes ,a texture in SL can be from 1 to 24mb ish size and theres alooot of them, they have everything installed to , if you had all of SL installed it would be alot faster (not likly you have room for it -.- its... alot )

SL is slow, render heavy insane , avatars can kill off your fps no matter when its enough of them, constant streaming textures applying it to surfaces is totally a killer to render, not to mention 1 sim can have several gigs of textures you need to apply on surfaces ,wich it renders no matter if you see them or not wich hurt performance alot, its also have so many issues >.<;

Try going to a place where theres lots of people and ctlr-shift-alt-d , bring up debug, then ctrl-shift-r , you can see the wireframe SL is and what mess you shouldnt have seen since you cant but it renders it anyway.

^^; yeh we all wish SL was smarter and better fps, cause some sims with lots of avatars will bring it down to about 3 fps, expect never to see 30+fps with a couple of avatars around , 1gig cache is kinda small <,<

SL doesn't support Dual core processors, so it goes nuts when you have both CPU cores running. The above reply is correct. Switching the affinity to just one core will definately fix your problem. :3 You should notice a small (maybe 5-10 fps) change in busy sims, and a /huge/ difference in low-rate sims. I went from running around 20 fps in the slow sims, to about 60. And from around 8-10 in busy sims, on up to 25 or even 30. The change is quite dramatic!

If you don't know how to change affinity, it's easy. Just ctrl-alt-del with SL running, go to the processes tab, right click on secondlife.exe and go to 'set affinity..' Then uncheck CPU 0' and hit okay. Should notice the change immediately!

Have fun!
-Emmy

Hehe, they should really fix that, most cpus are dual core. ANd where do i configure that?

ctrl-alt-del , windows task manager, process, right click on SL, set affinity to one of them , windows wont remember it next time you start tho,

i still use this little prog

http://www.networktechs.com/download-601/

Just add SL to it, and set affinity there, you can launch anything from it if they have issues with 2 cores just save whatever games you use on it, and parameters if you want -multiple -login username lastname password.

I didn't realize SL had problems with duel cored Intels... I know AMDs have trouble for sure. I found that the big problem for SL on AMD isn't the two cores necessarily but running OpenGL on duel AMD processors. I found a utility that shuts off OpenGL rendering running on both cores and limits it to one does the trick. I have SL using both cores on my machine now, setting affinity has no effect. It's late and I don't remember the name of it, I'll get back with ya.

Hm, can anyone confirm problems with Intel Core 2 Duo cpus? And is this a CPU<->OpenGL issue or really specific to SL.

Someone else suggested FPS is related to network latency, if this is the case this is simply a design flaw in SL. There is not a single *good* reason to have the two tied, the client should simply render the current "state" of the engine as often as possible, the state being updated as often as possible over the network.

Another issue i have with SL rendering is that it sometimes happens that the culling algorithms take more time than the time it would take to render the geometry that was determined to be invisible. Sometimes you zoom out (but not far enough to cause significant triangle drops due to LOD) and the fps rises.

Finally, i dont think the argument of "it isn't a game so it's harder to predict what needs to happen" is a particularly valid one when it comes to rendering. I agree that a more generic application will have overhead, but if you look at the frame window it is clearly seen that the vast majority of time is spent in "RenderGeom" which should actually be one of the few parts that *are* very specific and static throughout SL (i.e. it shouldnt go much beyond "render these tri strips using these textures/shaders). Yet magically SL manages to have 1/4th the FPS of your average game while the latter has a way higher tri count per frame usually. My guess is that the rendering pipeline of SL is simply a bit borked and should be examined. Use existing 3D engines or give Carmack a call or something. I revoke this statement if SL manages to have the "RenderGeom" time depend on network latency, but then all logic is lost.

All nVidia cards appear to suffer performance problems with SL using Forceware series 9 drivers. Search the forum - there's been several threads. Go to tweaksrus.com and get a series 8 driver and watch your FPS double.

He can't use thte 8x.xx drivers, his cards aren't supported.

Exactly, besides, this seems a bit weird considering most games have performance improvements with the 9xxx drivers. I'm having more and more doubts about SL's OGL rendering pipeline

Yeah, back with the 84.xx drivers (never got to try the 85.xx) I was normally running around 17 - 22 FPS, in 91.47 everything runs stable around 12 - 15FPS but looks a hell of alot nicer especially with nVidia's goof in 91.47 where my 6600GT now has Transparancy Anti-Aliasing (both Multi & SuperSampling). Wich reminds me I should try TAA in SS mode (current in Multi). All my major slowdowns I've noticed are attributed to Ping spikes that send me to less then 2 FPS and force me to relog.

Are you sure - the tweaksrus.com site has modified the INF files so that different drivers work with cards they weren't intended to. If you're thinking of the support nVidia ships; it might not be the same as what's available on that site.

Sadly, if the card's flat out not supported by 8.x series drivers, then I suppose the known issue with the 9.x drivers at least solves the mystery of slow FPS... as far as resolving it - wait until someone fixes either SL or the driver?

The 8x.xx drivers came way before the 7950GX2. While 84.xx and 85.xx support SLI they don't support dual GPUs. Sure you can mod the INF to allow it to install, but stability and performance would be highly questionable. The 91.xx drivers are designed to handle dual GPUs, the 8x.xx are not.

Oh btw, have you guys tried making performance & quality profiles for Second Life? They seem to really help. I gain a few FPS here and there, but mostly I gain stability and Image Quality (IQ). All I gotta say is SL looks awsome with 4x MultiSampling Anti-Aliasing, 8x Ansitropic Filtering, and Transparancy SuperSampling Anti-Aliasing with no slowdowns.

sl doesnt seem to use a 'hot' fast connection, as download is throttled at 100kbps

Thats odd.. I've seen it download as fast as 500 or more kbps.

Maybe he or she is referring to the ingame bandwidth, the cap of which can be set in th Network tab btw.