Wicked Low framerate! Help Please

I have a amd dual core 4200 processor with 2gb ram and a nvidia geforce 7900 graphics card. I have tried all of the dual core fixes and yet I still cant get a frame rate over 5.0 fps. I have even turned down every graphical option I can find to the lowest setting. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Mike

Anyone? Any help?

Mesaloco - have you tried setting affinity to one processor?

I've heard others report of similar issues using dual core, and setting affinity to one seems to help, as counterintuitive as that may seem

Hope this helps!

Thanks but i tried that already and saw zero improvement. Any other suggestions?

What screen resolution are you using? If you make the window smaller, does the frame rate increase? If it does, it's probably related to the video card, in which case you may want to try downloading and installing the latest device driver from http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp; if that's not the case, it's probably something else, in which case you at least narrowed down the problem.

Also, are you running any other applications that are consuming CPU cycles? And how fast is your internet connection?

Thanks for the suggestions. I have installed the latest nvidia drivers. When i resize the screen the frame rate still is bad. It never gets over 5 fps and is usually around 3fps. Second life is using around 49% of the cpu load. The rest is idle with the occasional 1% from a few background tasks. I am conecting with a cable modem and my bandwidth meter is usually over 200 kbps when things are loading. I have cleared out the cache as well and set the limit to 1000mb. I dont really know what else to do. I believe its a cpu problem of some sort. I also installed the latest drivers from amd and the optimizer with no improvements. I was really looking forward to using second life.

Very strange. I've got a fairly similar setup:

AMD Dual-Core 4400+
1.5 GB Memory
nVidia 7600GS
LanParty nF4 Ultra-D Chipset
**No Dual-core patches or fixes applied
Windows XP SP2

If I have both CPU's rolling, I typically get about 8 FPS in a busy area at a draw distance of 256m. If I set affinity to one cpu, I get about 12 FPS under the same conditions.

In a crazy-packed area with lots of laggy items around, I've seen it drop as low as 5 FPS.

Up in a skybox area, I'm more up around 30-40 FPS.

A few observations:

-Its normal for SecondLife.exe to peg the CPU. It does that for everyone, regardless of framerate.

-You said your bandwidth meter is 200kbps when things are loading. What is it like when you're idle, then? If its above 75 kbps, you're probably ok.

-You said 1% from background tasks. Even though they're probably small & insignificant... can you/have you tried to shut those down & see what happens?

-You said you set your bandwidth slider at 1000. When you're online, do you see any packet loss? If you are, your network slider is set way too high.

-You cleared out the cache. What about completely uninstalling the client AND manually deleting the residual files (The uninstaller is notorius for leaving files behind) - then re-installing?

-Have you tried teleporting to a completely different location, and see if it changes the behavior at all?


Other than all that, my brain is spent. Really, bizarre, man - I hope you get this figured out!

I dont know how i fixed it but it seems to work now. I reinstalled second life and all drivers yet again and now im getting a solid 40 fps. Thanks for all the suggestions.