Tell LL how the game runs for you!

I figure the following are what's important when running SL, the reason for this post is I want to try and determine what the "real" requirements are for SL. I have posted a simple listing of my system specs and if everyone else follows suite with their own and operating system I will be more than happy to graph the results and try to find a middle ground in terms of what computer hardware/software run SL the best. Don't forget to give an "average" FPS that you get in game like when shopping, clubbing, building, sandboxes, just a general number please of your overall performance.

Windows XP Professional SP2
10 - 15 FPS in-game on average.

1.11Ghz AMD Athlon
512MB RAM
256MB NVIDIA GeForce 6200

Windows XP
AMD Athlon 2.8 GHZ
2 GB RAM
512MB GeForce 6600

Average FPS in clubs/malls/busy areas? 5-10 FPS

It runs like poo poo

Windows 2000 Professional whatever the latest SP is for it
10 - 15 FPS in-game on average.

1.3 Ghz Pentium 4
1280 MB RAM
128MB NVIDIA GeForce 5500

I have to keep my draw distance to 64 with fog up to 4.0
If I am in a busy sim, I might get 6 fps.

I live in a perpetual fog...but I don't freeze up, I don't crash.

Framerate of SL is:

A. Decided by the combination of network, CPU and memory performance and gfx performance. Which means that you need to not just report CPU/Ram/GFX, but also take ping and networking bandwidth into account.

But more importantly:

B. Decided by the selected (graphics) options. You need to also report the things like: aniso/AA usage, local lighting, object/av rendering level (sliders) and most importantly draw distance.

And finally:

C. Location and avatar count, speeds will differ enormously depending on the amount and type of prims in your immediate area.

Next to that, SL has proven to be very 'picky' and can cause high end configurations to
perform terrible, without no clear reason whatsoever.

I'm afraid a simple listing will be insufficient to offer any real information on the 'real requirements'.

Well, if you want to be very technical about it but I am not going for 100% accuracy that and with LL changing everything it would actually make the results less accurate if anything because they are constantly tweaking everything and coming out with these small updates.

There are alot of factors that could be calculated, but I am just looking at one specfic part. The hardware that people are using to run the game, and then for software all I ask is for the OS so I can see a trend of higher FPS in Windows or Mac.

At any rate, don't be a troll. Post your specs! Keep them coming people!

Hrmm, how to sum it up: let's see... Since 1.7, SL has run like absolute and complete crud, with recurring multiple problems far too numerous to list (I have a list, at home, but I'm writing from work).

My system:
Abit KD-7a Motherboard, 1 Gig DDR266 RAM, Athlon XP 2200
Sound Blaster Live! Value (somewhat old, I know)
ATi Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB AGP8x Video Card
OS: Windows XP Pro SP2
Firewall: Zone Alarm Pro
AntiVirus: Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition v7.6

ISP/Internet Connection: Time Warner Cable of New York City

In-game settings:
Only Shadows and Shiny Objects are on
Terrain Detail - about 1/3
Object Detail - 1/2
Avatar Detail - Full
Streaming Video and Music: off
Draw Distance - 96m
Fog - 4.0
Max Particles - 1024
Outfit Composite Limit - 1
Bumpiness Draw Distance - 1m

With these wonderfully low settings, sufficient barely to render the world around me, I get a fantastic, absolutely whopping 4 - 7 fps in 95% of sims. If the sim is crowded, I tend to average 1 - 3 fps (QUITE satisfactory for a slide show, yes, thank you very much!) If by some off-chance I climb to 1,000m altitude AGL, I jump nicely up to 20 - 30 fps, as long as I am the only thing in the sky. If another avatar shows up, it drops to 10 - 14 fps. Do pardon my rather heavy sarcasm, but what a wonderful new benchmark of rendering speed you've discovered, LL!

Considering Tech Support and the Lindens in general have some odd form of non-answer policy, requiring them to provide (apparently as a matter of job retention, I should gather, much like it was a time back from AOL) purposely vague and in general non-helpful or at minimum noncommittal answers, I have to rate my SL experience as significantly below par.

Service with a non-helpful smile, and a virtual chat-room experience that as updates come has dropped less and less into the void of non-performance. I am quite glad I am on a free account these days, despite being poor in-game. I would not pay for such a lack were I ordered to do so on pain of loss of life and limb.

Thank you for starting a thread where the intent is to vent one's ire at the performance of this place.

Yours in most assured annoyance,
Mika Kyubi (Muromachi)
Kitsune-at-Large
(Who wants her name of KYUBI in SL! [and knows now she'll ne'er see it])

As you wish

- Win XP SP2
- 3 Ghz P4 / 1GB RAM
- 128MB Geforce 6600 GT AGP

Speeds between 3-40 FPS, average around 10

Perhaps I am misreading something, but - turning your fog distance ratio reduces the amount of fog. Low fog distance ratio increases fogginess, turning the fog distance ration up to 4 produces as little fog effect as possible.

- Win XP SP2
- 2 Ghz P4 / 2GB RAM
- 256MB Geforce 6800

15-30 FPS

15 fps in the WA!!! YAY

I have shiney, water ripple ON
Terrain Detail - Full
Avatar, Tree, Object Detail - Full

Can't remember the rest, as I am at work.

Needless to say, I love my shiny new laptop!!

I'm one of those a$$ holes that blow the curve...

AMD X2 Dueal Core 4400+
2gig 3200 Corsair Memory
XFX 6800 Ultra 512
A8N-SLI Premium motherboard

I have AA set to 8xS and AF 16x

Draw distance 160
I use drop draw distance instead of far clip and my fps is set to 17
LL off
Shine on
Shadows off
Ripple water on
Anastropic Filtering off (game setting off because it is maxed out in the driver settings)
AGP acceleration doesn't make more than a one or two fps difference either way for me.

In my home sim I get between 25 and 30 fps depending on direction. Stangly i gett better fps looking at "town" than I do looking out to sea, probably all the underwater seaweeds. Ripple water makes no difference.

Yesterday I was at Furnation Tria as security and snapped this pic. There were 52 avatars in the sim with lots of prim attachments and I was getting around 10 fps average and was still able to move well.

You can turn off fog if you like, it makes no difference on performance, it just makes the fact your draw distance is so short less jarring reality wise. Turning off the fog will make it blarringly obvious you can't render things very far away but you will see blue sky and water.

Machine 1
- 1.7 Ghz P4
- 1 GGB RAM
- 256MB GeForce 6800

Machine 2
- 1.7 Ghz P4
- 1 GGB RAM
- 256MB ATI Radeon

Both have shadows, local lighting and water ripple turned off, both have all detail settings to high, shiny ON, and draw distance of 256. Avg. 15 - 30 FPS. I am usually one of the LAST to bitch about lag in a crowded SIM, especially if I turn off clouds and fog.

Most NOTICABLE performance improvement was was going from 512MB of RAM to a GIG

Yes, system RAM seems to affect the game very much in my experiments. Another thing that I have messed with is the cache, alot of people say to turn it all the way up. I say match it with the same amount of VRAM you got and that seems to make my FPS really jump in complicated builds with lots of textures.

Here is one more for you to try, if you are using a PCI Express card make sure you have AGP TURNED OFF and I got instant 10 more FPS no matter where I was at.

PS: Windows XP Users! One thing that also really helped me when I first started my experiments was to turn off that god forsaken indexing service. You can do this by going to the Properties page for your drive (if you have more than one, you must do it to all of them) and turn off the indexing service checkbox on the bottom. It will have to re-flag all the files on the drive, some are read-only but these are system files most of the time so you can click "Ignore All" and not worry.

This is from memory

1.47 Ghz Athlon XP
786MB Ram
Geforce FX 5900 (128MB)
FiOS internet access (30/5)

Local Lighting off
Most other features on
Full Avatar detail
3/4 World detail
128m draw distance

Typically I get good framerates 10-15 FPS, although crowded areas with lots of avatars (dance clubs) easily drop me down into the 2-5 FPS range. There are highly built up areas that also impact my framerate, but overall it's pretty steady. The biggest bottleneck for me is getting the textures to download, sometimes they take forever even though I have more than enough bandwidth.

The only feature that caused me much pain was Local Lighting. I don't know why, but that one really murdered my frame rates. Most of the other features seem to be more or less free.

Computer
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
OS Service Pack Service Pack 2
DirectX 4.09.00.0904 (DirectX 9.0c)

Motherboard
CPU Type Intel Pentium 4 530J, 3000 MHz (15 x 200)
Motherboard Name Asus PTGD1-LA (3 PCI, 4 DDR DIMM, Audio, Video, LAN, IEEE-1394)
Motherboard Chipset Intel Grantsdale-G i915G
System Memory 1015 MB
BIOS Type AMI (02/16/05)
Communication Port ECP Printer Port (LPT1)

Display
Video Adapter RADEON 9250 (256 MB)
3D Accelerator ATI Radeon 9250 (RV280)
3D Accelerator Intel GMA 900
Monitor ViewSonic A90 [19" CRT] (NP03357083)

Multimedia
Audio Adapter Creative SB0312 Audigy LS Sound Card

Storage
IDE Controller Intel(R) 82801FB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 2651
IDE Controller Intel(R) 82801FB/FBM Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 266F
SCSI/RAID Controller D347PRT SCSI Controller
SCSI/RAID Controller NERO IMAGEDRIVE SCSI Controller
SCSI/RAID Controller VAX347S SCSI Controller
Disk Drive Maxtor 6B200M0 (200 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA)
Disk Drive Generic USB SD Reader USB Device
Disk Drive Generic USB CF Reader USB Device
Disk Drive Generic USB SM Reader USB Device
Disk Drive Generic USB MS Reader USB Device
Disk Drive Maxtor OneTouch II IEEE 1394 SBP2 Device (279 GB)
Optical Drive ASUS CD-S480/A5 (48x CD-ROM)
Optical Drive Generic DVD-ROM SCSI CdRom Device
Optical Drive HP DVD Writer 640b
Optical Drive SCSIVAX DVD/CD-ROM SCSI CdRom Device
SMART Hard Disks Status OK

Partitions
C: (NTFS) 184548 MB (87855 MB free)
D: (FAT32) 6211 MB (723 MB free)
P: (NTFS) 286181 MB (119784 MB free)
Total Size 465.8 GB (203.5 GB free)

Input
Keyboard HID Keyboard Device
Keyboard HP PS2 Keyboard (2K - 3)
Mouse Logitech HID-compliant Cordless Mouse
Game Controller Microsoft PC-joystick driver

Network
Network Adapter Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC (24.210.186.5
Modem Agere Systems PCI Soft Modem

Peripherals
Printer HP DeskJet 930C/932C/935C
USB1 Controller Intel 82801FB ICH6 - USB Universal Host Controller [B-1]
USB1 Controller Intel 82801FB ICH6 - USB Universal Host Controller [B-1]
USB1 Controller Intel 82801FB ICH6 - USB Universal Host Controller [B-1]
USB1 Controller Intel 82801FB ICH6 - USB Universal Host Controller [B-1]
USB2 Controller Intel 82801FB ICH6 - Enhanced USB2 Controller [B-1]
USB Device Logitech Cordless USB Mouse
USB Device Microsoft SideWinder Precision 2
USB Device USB Mass Storage Device

Personal test results
Speed

4.4 megabits per second
Communications 4.4 megabits per second
Storage 535.3 kilobytes per second
1MB file download 1.9 seconds
Subjective rating Awesome

___________________________

I rarely crash but do get lag at times.

_____________________________

This weeks specs

Windows XP Professional SP2
DirectX 4.09.00.0904 (DirectX 9.0c)

AMD Athlon 64 +3200 (2010mhz)
2gb DDR400 ram
GeForce 6600 256mb
Asus A8n-SLI (probably gonna pick up a pair of 7600s when they come out)

AA set at 4x
Draw distance at 192
Shiny, ripple water on
Bump mapping and cloth on
Local lighting off

Average FPS ("home": 30 fps
Average FPS (Welcome Area): 13-15 fps

For now, SL runs fine.

CPU: P4 3.06 GHz
RAM: 1 GB RDRAM
Windows XP Pro SP2 (fully patched)
DSL: 512 kbps
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (128 MB)

FPS: What FPS <grrr>? My avatar won't even MOVE!

The last two updates have rendered SL TOTALLY USELESS for me. Press a movement key and Packet Loss goes to 100%. 10 or 20 seconds later, the avatar actually decides to move ... through walls, into the ground, wherever it was "aimed".

The game is completely UNplayable for me now <grrr>.

Settings? EVERYTHING is set to absolute minimums, with NO graphic options enabled at all.

Yes, I've cleared my cache.
Yes, I've defragged the hard drive and it has 40% free space.

No, there are no other programs running, except Zone Labs Firewall and Norton Anti-Virus (which continually thinks SL is an "Internet Worm <sigh>.

Actual DSL speed tests show I get 420-420 kbps download and 150-180 kbps upload.

Don't know what LL has done, but I'm paying close to $50 a month (for acct. and land) and am getting quite pissed.


UPDATE Feb 3, 2006
--------------------
It took an UNinstall / REinstall of the SL Client, but things are back to "normal" for my DSL connection.

Current FPS: 25-35 depending where and when

I recently got a new computer for SL.


More info on my experiences here.

Jumpin, try turning off your firewall and see if it makes a difference. Same with Nortons. Nortons anything does not like SL a lot of the time. You might also try uninstalling SL completely and reinstalling with Nortons turned off. Your symptoms sound exactly like you are getting blocked by a firewall or a bad wireless connection.

Packet loss isn't an idicator of problems with your system running the game, its your net connection. You DSL is the weakest link of your system and thats where your issues are coming from. I'm not saying DSL is bad for SL, I got a 3.0Mbit DSL connection and its running just fine. But with your speed DSL, its like having a ghetto'd setup running 4 ISDN lines. I dunno what your situation is like where you live, but all I can say is see if you can at least get upgraded to a 1.0Mbit or 1.5Mbit connection at least.

This is good stuff people! Keep the stats coming! And Toy, did I really need to know about your Communication Port ECP Printer Port (LPT1)? hehe

Well it was on my list from Everest and didnt feel like editing hehehe

You are from Ohio too! Represent!

Before I post a graph here are some simple averages with the information you guys gave me against what LL's specs from the link right off the front page:

-US-
CPU: 2.276 GHz (2.0 GHz Processor)
RAM: 1244MB (1GB of RAM)
VRAM: 246MB (256MB Graphics Card)

-THEM MIN-
CPU: 800MHz
RAM: 256MB
VRAM: 128MB

-THEM MAX-
CPU: 1.6GHz
RAM: 512MB
VRAM: 256MB

Now most of your posts everyone was having performance problems, out of like 14 spec postings only maybe three of you guys said you actually like your experience in-game, and almost everyone said it sucked and or could be better.

You can tell just from this little experiement that the system requirements might need some updating if you want to be able to do things like walking around, clubbing, etc.

I will expand on this, I think hard evidence might be better for the L's rather than us whining at them.