Horrible Lag. Good system, fast connection

Ok. I have a decent system for this game, and a nice net connection, however Im getting horrible horrible lag(like 5-10 FPS). Doesnt matter the time of day, or the location (well have noticed that if I am in an area with less people that it does load a little better) the net connection icon in the upper left corner of the screen is more red then yellow(however never, ever any packet loss). If I fly away to somewhere less crowded it of course it drops a little, but if i walk into a building, same thing. it takes forever for things to render. I checked my task manager to see if It was sucking up any resources and my memory was fine. (like 300mb) but it was sucking up like 95%-97% of my CPU. I do get that warning in the begining of the game when it gives me the lecture on how AGP is better than PCI, etc. I tried turning almost all the graphics down and I still get the same situation. I basically think its one of 2 things.

1. No support for my vid card(Pci-e) so it has to use software to render the graphics, sucking my CPU of life

2. Network issue. Obviously would have to be some sort of routing issue as my speeds are above average.

I can usually troubleshoot things prety good on my own, but this is driving me batty. I want to play the game soo bad and even pay for premium, but if Im having problems like this, I dont know... Anyway. one morething that came to mind. I didnt see any documentation on this (then again I didnt think of t until now) do any ports need to be open?(I am on a router)

System:
AX8 Abit motherboard with PCI-E
Athlon 64bit 3200
1.5Gig RAM PC3200 400Mhz
Geforce 6800 gt 256Mb PCI-Express SLI(one card however)
Barracuda 7800.8 160gig HD

Internet speed

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Download
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Your connection is: 7162 Kbps or 7.16 Mbps
You Downloaded at: 874 kB/s
You are running: 125 times faster than 56K and can Download 1 megabyte in 1.17 second(s)
Member Ident: CompID:224503488142
Test Time:: 2006/04/30 - 6:53pm
Test Browser and OS info: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2
Test ID: LSZR0TDAM (if this is a screenshot go to testmy.net to see if this is fake)
Diagnosis ^info^: Awesome! 20% + : 98.45 % faster than the average for host (adelphia.net)
This was tested from a 5983 kB file and took 6.844 seconds to complete
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Upload
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Your connection is: 889 Kbps or 0.89 Mbps
You Uploaded at: 109 kB/s
You are running: 16 times faster than 56K and can Upload 1 megabyte in 9.39 second(s)
Member Ident: CompID:224503488142
Test Time:: 2006/04/30 - 8:55pm
Test Browser and OS info: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2
Test ID: U0QBF6VIT (if this is a screenshot go to testmy.net to see if this is fake)
Diagnosis ^info^: Awesome! 20% + : 89.15 % faster than the average for host (adelphia.net)
This was tested from a 1496 kB file and took 13.78464 seconds to complete

I'm having the same problem, I have a very fast rig, and a good DSL connection and everything is so damn slow. I don't know if its cause the port this game uses is blocked, or because of something running in the background.

Well for one thing you gotta relize that SL isn't like any other game in existance right now. Sure games like The Sims may SEEM similar, but in reality its a whole different beast. Let me list the differences:

1. No data is stored locally, everything is streamed. Its impossible for SL to store perminate data about the world like WoW or EQ2 because of how dynamic the world is. Unlike WoW where the company makes everything in the world, the users create everything in real time. So there is no "snap shots" of the current world to download, its all streamed in real time.

2. SL doesn't use static meshes. Because static meshes are hard to compress and stream on the fly without eating up alot of bandwith and/or quality loss atm, every piece of every item is just that: pieces. Nothing is really optimised from say 100 pieces into one solid object by converting it into a mesh so there is alot more surface to actually render for each "object" in game. Its a waste of polygons and not very efficient, but LL is working on improving things without crippling whats already in the game.

3. SL is more like a bastard child of a 3d rendering program like Lightwave and the text based mmorpgs of old known as MUSHs (aka MUDs, MUDDs, MUCKs, and MOOs). As a result there is very little done GPU side. Currently in 1.9.0(21) the only things that are processed GPU side is Ripple Water. On the preview grid for 1.9.1(16), that will be increased to the adition of a new Hardware Local Lighting mode and Vertex Shaders.

And thats all I can think of atm, I'm pretty sure someone will add to that. Oh btw, what's your graphics & advanced graphics setting in SL? Usually tweaking those will improve things.

EDIT: Currently if you're running at 15 FPS in heavy build/crowded areas thats considered really good, but otherwise in average load areas anything around 15 is considered normal.

ok so 10-15 FPS it average? Im just a spoiled gamer and should STFU and play then, lol. Anyway, one more question. I have noticed that bandwidth wise things are taking a while to load mostly the map. when I press ctrl+M and bring up the map. its hardly loaded, and the terrain puts along then will focus a little while after that, this to me is pointing towards a network/bandwidth issue, however I changed my settings and the bar on top is green almost all the time. Network-wise, will I benefit from opening any ports, or is this all going thru port 80 or some really high port? if so, is there a way to change it/find what ports I need to open? thanks.

P.S. is there an IP that I can use to troubleshoot with for traceroutes, pings, etc? Thanks.

Try going to the network tab and move the slider to the right from 500 to 1000. Also try setting your draw distance to 64 and whatever you do, do NOT enabled local lighting.

the image(s?) that make up the map are also ginormous all together

for best performance, only have shiney objects checked, and make the draw distance down like at 128 or 64

increase and add stuff from there playing around with it to see how it runs.

I did a benchmark test a few days ago on various systems and posted the results. You can check that out & see what I got. For the most part, 10-15 FPS is pretty damn good. And yea, the map is slower than hell to load.

You just gotta tweak the settings, and keep trying to find that sweet spot where visual quality and FPS give a decent performance. Dont expect 30-60 FPS. Just aint gonna happen.

Try this for size ^^ debug menu - fast timers....
look at the pretty bars -- find out which pretty bar is eating masses of frame time
disable -- that element in debug menu see if FPS improves -- repeat until bored
Statistics view give good indication of Sim performance too time dialation,scripts perf etc

ATI card user? Google for omega drivers latest ver is a doozy for SL