SL = Unplayable

Hello, i recently downloaded the game and decided to try the free trial.

I am currently running a 2.2ghz processor with 1gig of RAM and a Radeon X850 256mb graphics card.

So i start out in the trial, everything goes alright ... just a bit of lag.

I teleport out in to the world and my fps slows to a crawl. I was getting under 1 (yes one) fps.

After about 10 minutes of waiting for it to die down i attempt to fly out to a less crowded place. It was a bit hard to maneuver through all of the invisible buildings (I assume they were still loading.). Finally i managed to find a spot with very few objects and still had about 5 fps. At this time, i had all the grapic options on high because to be honest, i run extremely graphic intense games with zero lag, and the graphics in this game seem ... well a bit bad to put it bluntly (no offense, really)

SO, i exit out and turn everything to bare minimum. I log back in and notice maybe a 1-2 fps increase.

SL seems like a very interesting game and i would like to try it out, so if anyone has any idea on how to fix my fps, it would be very much appreciated.

Actually lol, Im having the same problem right now.. I have no problems with my other games either, but SL is running absolutely horribly. The best fix I have found so far, is running it in a window and turning local lighting off. Nothing else really seems to make much of a difference, it runs badly. EXCEPT - When I first log in, it runs fine, just as soon as I start to turn, it goes to crap.

Athlon XP 3000+
nVidia GeForce 6800 NonUltra 128mb 8xagp
1GB DDR400 Dual Channel RAM
160GB UltraATA133 Harddrive
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

I have all the latest drivers and updates installed. I also have 1.5 MBps max down/1Mbps max upstream connection (Yes, that downstream is 1.5MegaBytes, not bits, most cable are 4Mbps, mine is quite a bit faster lol), so that shouldnt be it either.I would love to try out SL more, but with the current state, I cant.

Hey guys. I'm running SL on a Celeron 1.7GHz and GeForce MX440 (I think), and I get just about the same performance on it as I do with Sims 2 for example, which is to say not very good performance. However, it doesn't bother me. I don't think you can compare it with a 3D first-person shooter game engine, for instance

It would be interesting if someone made a run-down of the load SL places on different components of the computer system (disk, RAM, video memory, FPU, network) so we can find out what the limiting factor typically is.

Part of your poorer performance is the "streaming uber alles" nature of SL; your high-intensity graphic games get to use all kinds of cheats to make the engine run faster. SL has to do everythign honestly as it is totally dynamic.

That said, certain of the features don't really add anything. Local Lighting, frex, isn't very good and is often misused, so feel free to turn that off.

Unfortunatly if you live outside the US or even on the East Coast, distance is going to be a factor. Ping times can be to the point of unplayability in places far away from San Fransisco.

Where are you located and what are your line speeds? If you can ping the LL server you can see if there is a problem between you and them. (the support wiki explains how to do this)

Have a look at this post for good hints as how to set the preferences for more performance. You might want to keep AGP acceleration on, though. On my pc (2.8ghz intel cpu, geforce fx 5200 with 128mb video ram, 1gb ram), "draw distance" seems to have the biggest impact on performance. Once you have SL playable with really conservative preferences, you can always try to up the draw distance and activate eye candy features like "shiny" and see what works best for you.

In a dedicated game, the designers can use every trick under the sun to ensure that most users will get a good frame rate, safe in the knowledge that non of the users can mess with the in-game content beyond what the programmer allows.

An example of this, you look around your average FPS and while most things in the foreground may be highly detailed, a lot of it will be clever textures on very simple models. Just enough detail to make it look good, not too much that would reduce frame rate. Look into the distance and the details are further replaced by textures. Done well you don't notice it as you're concentrating on the foreground action.

In SL you could replicate all of this, and get a similar frame rate. But then you have to add on top all the builds of your neighbours, and their neighbours, and the surrounding sims. And then take into account the objects could be 2, 5 or 10 times more laggy through inexperience of the builder...

The content, build wise, within the SL world probably equals the total content of most of the other online games all added together... and any of it can (and does) change at any time.

Local Light = ouch unless you have a serious computer , especially on long range, in mid air way above 500m to avoid ground its not that bad, stick local light + 512 view however youll crawl.

Render distance on lone sims arent to bad, can run 512 quite easy on them if there isnt 15+ avatars near, more av's more to render and they can be quite insane amount to do, usually sits about 96-196m for me

Ati users should consider using omega's, they are more suited towards SL, as they are tweaked and fixed alot better
Uninstall it and use http://www.drivercleaner.net/
then download the ati drivers from this http://www.omegadrivers.net/

SL depends heavyilly on cpu , ram, gpu , harddrive, (in that order) alot more then any game out there , yes they all cheat to have fast rendering ;P , take Lod , in other game they dont render things you cant see however SL do render behind what you cant see , avatars in SL can be very detailed wich will blow any game away in polygon counts.

SL has some odd quirks here and there, but you learn to live with them , and report them every time they break ~.~ online things are always in beta anyway, theres no "final" products anymore.

^^ SL is one of the best online build, social, hangout, anything i tried, not to big fan of the current physic's tho , i hope you can figure out what to smack around to try it, oh an advice i give to new players, dont buy anything the first week, tooo many are selling things you can get for free, and feel free to ask anyone anything most people are quite helpfull.

In fact building things that actively lower framerate is considered sport by some

I would suggest actually setting the Drop Draw setting to at least 5 (although I set mine at 17 which maintains smooth motion). This will automatically drop the draw distance to maintain a frame rate where you can still move. Fog has no impact on frame rate but it makes things a little more realistic so I set mine around 3.

Long story short, all the things you guys mentioned, the ONE thing that makes SL drag to no end, is Local Light, at least for me. I can turn everything else up, but the moment I turn local light on, everything goes to crap.

And thanks to those help peoples that helped me IW, I am running fine. However, I would still like to see SLs rendering engine optimized further, not saying anything about the great work they have already done, but, the engine still seems it could use some tweaking I dont want to go long-winded, but I have monitored my system on hundreds of PC games, tweaked, overclocked, upgraded connections, etc. all in attempts to make games run flawlessly, and be able to multitask on my PC and connection well. I personally have never had as much problems with making something run well as I have with SL. Again, no reason to flame, I am not attacking SL in any way, as I enjoy it very much so far My goal, in the end, is to be able to turn all values up to high numbers or maxed, and SL still run well (Again, I understand in some populated areas or areas with lots of geom it can slow down, nothing new in that ). But local light just seems to be the devil with my system at least...