What's your frame rate? Mine stinks!

I'm on a Mac Mini, with the standard video card in it (an ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB DDR video memory), running Mac OS 10.3.9 and SL 1.7.1(2). No matter where I go, I can't seem to get better than a momentary frame rate of 9 fps, and most of the time I'm only getting 2.5 to 3.5 fps.

I have a high-speed cable modem Internet connection, so bandwith shouldn't be an issue. In fact, the stats show I'm only using about 1/4 of the bandwith that I set in my preferences.

I'm not loaded down with scripted add-ons or other junk that should cause lag. My Avatar is wearing a Jakkal's Werehouse Red Fox av, which has no special scripting. Before I started the test, I detached my /hug and /kiss script attachments, which are the only two scripted things I usually wear. Other than that, I just have on some simple clothes and a prim hairstyle.

I did some telehub hopping this morning, just picking hubs at random and checking the stats. I went to something like 15 different randomly selected sims, none of which had more than a handful of people in them. In each case, the frame rate I was getting was no better than 9 fps. Usually, if it started at 9, it dropped to 3.5 or less within a few seconds of teleporting in. What's up with this?

Of course, at that frame rate, texture loading was the pits. Also, none of the textures were staying cached. Most of the world was only partially rezzed.

I've tried tweaking my preferences to various settings that are said to reduce lag, and nothing seems to help. Any advice would be welcome.

Can some of the rest of you please check what your frame rate is, and report that here with your OS type and version, plus the info on your graphics card?

You're doing better than I am in many cases. In 1.6, I averaged, oh, 20-25fps or so. It's more like 11 in a very uncrowded area now, and if I go to the Welcome Area, it's often down to about 1, and never exceeds 2. I'd expect to get 11-15 there. In the Welcome Area, I can easily outtype the chat bar, which makes me look even dumber than usual, with all the typos.

WinXP, Athlon 3200+, NVidia 6800GT, running at 1920x1200. I used to turn all the extra settings on, detail at max, and got those results... in the new version, I've turned off everything but Shiny and Local Lighting (which I think are important to have turned on), set all the detail sliders to the lowest setting, and I'm STILL getting 1/5th to 1/10th the frame rate.

OK. There is a sim near my home that is apparently 'under construction', and is therefore both accessible and empty. These stats were taken in the Paradise sim, with me as the only Avatar in the sim, flying just above a featureless sea.



The 'Sim FPS' stat looks fine - 45
The 'Sim FPS' stat looks fine - 44.9 to 45
Time Dilation? - 1.00

So... WHY does it show a 'Basic FPS' of only 4.5 for me??? I'm the only thing in the sim, right? Shouldn't that top meter read 45? Or at least 19.9. matching the 'Agent updates/Sec' stat?

If I go into mouselook and stare at the sea, the fps goes up to 15 or so. Stare at a featureless, cloudless area of sky, and it zooms up to 35 or higher. But if I look at anything? HA! back to the 2 to 5 range.

This is very confusing. But I can attest that the lower the reading gets on that top meter, the worse my individual experience of the frame rate and everything else gets.

Sigh, I hate to say it but I am kinda surprised the Mac Mini will run SL at all. Since the update everyone is experiencing lower framerates and they are working on fixing it although I wouldn't expect to get better than 10fps on a good day with that Mini.

FWIW, yesterday's update definitely seemed to improve things. I was getting 5 or 6 FPS in the Welcome Area... still about half what it was, but playable. No chat lag, either. And that's with my settings cranked back up... at minimums, it was more like 11 or 12.

So a very dramatic improvement from yesterday... things are usable now. Hopefully they'll get them back to (at least as) fast as 1.6 again.

Well, these are the currently posted minimum requirements for SL:

Stated Mac OS X Requirements:
• Graphics Card: GeForce 2 or better, ATI Radeon 8500 or better
• Computer: 1 GHZ G4 or better, 512 MB of RAM
• OS: Mac OS 10.3.8 or higher
• Internet Connection: Broadband (DSL/Cable Modem/LAN)

Here's my Mac Mini:

My system:
• Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB DDR video memory
• Computer: 1.25 GHZ G4, 512 MB of RAM
• OS: Mac OS 10.3.9
• Internet Connection: Broadband (Cable Modem)

So, my Mac Mini meets or exceeds all the stated requirements. Yes, of course it would do even better on a dual CPU system with a wicked-fast, top of the line video card and huge amounts of RAM. But it should run well enough on my hardware.

Incidentally, the Lindens fixed something last night with the Asset servers, and moving things in and out of Inventory is now MUCH faster! In general things looked much better as well. I could move around better, and most everything seemed to come into focus and get texured in a reasonable amount of time. I didn't notice much in the way of things losing their textures once they rezzed in. I did notice that in some cases, if I switched a vendor to a new view, I had to look away and then look back at the vendor to get the image to rez. THAT was odd...

Didn't have time to stay on for very long, but it was a great improvement! My fps still only seemed to be 4.5 to 5, but overall performance was much better than last night.

The operative question is how did the Mac Mini run SL before the upgrade? What were the framerates then?

It wasn't all that bad for me on 1.6. Under 1.6 I would occasionally hit lag pockets, but under 1.7 it's always been slow. (Note that there has been some wonderful improvement since last night's asset server upgrade).

Unfortunately I didn't start noting exact frame rate numbers with the Stats panel until after 1.7 was released and things slowed down so much. But on 1.6 I was able to 'play tag' and chase a friend through a busy shopping area, and could keep up with all her darting around just fine. And textures used to stay rezzed once they initially loaded. My friend was on a higher-end Windows system, while I was on my Mac Mini. The whole time I was able to see the world in crisp focus, for anything that had already rezzed, and the new textures as I approached new areas or switched vendor displays rezzed rapidly.

So I'd say the "Mac Mini is not powerful enough to run SL argument" is moot. Unless this "upgrade" has rendered a new class of machines obsolete. That's good that things are starting to improve for you - the same with me (I'm on a fairly hi-end Windows machine) though still very far from approaching the pre-upgrade crispness.

I've got the 1.42 MHz mini, and when I got more than a few FPS I was doing well. I ended up putting together a Windows-based Frankenputer around a flakey GeForce 5600 (it's OK when I have a second fan blowing directly on it) just to play SL.

meeting or exceeding the stated requirements just means that your computer can accurately render the scene and there's a little CPU time available between frames to keep the user interface up.

If your computer DOESN'T meet the minimum requirements (like my laptop) what you get are things like "the ground is all swirly rainbow colors" or "characters are invisible, all you can see are attachments" or "the user interface locks up" or "it crashes".

But that doesn't explain the difference in performance pre/post upgrade with the same hardware. If SL, following the upgrade, now has a different PC baseline, LL should state that. Have they?

I say that because the Mini has integrated video memory and although the 9200 sounds like it is better than an 8500 but in the integrated (think laptop) configuration with shared memory, the actual performance may be less than the 8500 desktop card. The 9250 integrated is actually, according to Lee Linden, an Intel based video card and likely won't work with SL and isn't supported by LL.

Th fact it works with SL is great, don't get me wrong, but even so the specs on the mini indicate it isn't going to do real well in the game and FPS aren't going to be much over 10 fps even in 1.6.

According to the Lindens, they are considering raising the bar on the minimum requirements. They are also looking at resolving FPS issues with an upcoming update in a week or two if it can be done at all.

...and yet they still state on the 'Community' page of the website that "performance has been greatly improved" without any sense of irony. I wonder who that person is, the one with the greatly improved performance, I'm sure they're lonely. It's fair enough that they are having issues with the update, but considering I've met nobody who hasn't taken a serious FPS hit since 1.7, AND isn't suffering with slow or disappearing textures, I think it's somewhat early in the day to be making such claims. Most of all though, it doesn't make me too hopeful of future updates.

No use to a Mac user, but my FPS never gets above 12 in populated sims, and that's on a P4 2.53Ghz PC with a Radeon 9700 Pro, just for the record.

*sigh* Well, last night, "1.7" was both my version number and a close aproximation of my frame rate.

The sim performance itself looked OK, at about 44 fps. But I was only managing between 1.5 and 2 fps, while standing still in a small room with one person.

Reading the forums here, it seems that memory upgrades help. Unfortunately I can't afford to upgrade from 512MB to 1024 MB any time soon. Can't really justify that, when this is the only app that my system has problems with. And I do high-end 3D portrait rendering on my system, with no problems at all.

I sincerely hope the Lindens find a resolution to this, other than saying "Go pay money to beef up your computer". Because if 'Raising the bar" is their only solution, they will lose me as a customer and as a merchant, and will lose a lot of other folks as well, who simply can't afford the unwarranted escalation in hardware costs.

To be realistic you should remember that you get those 'minimum specification' notes on software boxes. Have you ever tried using the software inside on a 'minimum specification' computer?


I did. Once. That was my first introduction to the death by a thousand cuts process of maintaining a high spec PC...

However it is pretty clear that the current 'minimum specification' for SL is far too low and should have been updated with 1.7. Robin pretty much gave the game away a week or so ago in the 'Hotline'.

The fact that the minimum specifications remain unchanged merely underlines the disorganised state of LL.

Oddly enough, the new Dell Inspiron 2200 laptop I just bought has Intel integrated 91X video, which I'd heard would not run SL.. Well just for grins, I tried installing the 1.7.1 package, and I was surprised.. It works rather well, despite the fact that the laptop is a Celeron M/370 1.5ghz w/512mb.. Its rather nice to be able to get in from someplace other than home.. In fact, I'm writing this from a wifi-equiped coffeehouse....

TazPerth

An interesting note. This morning I went on again, flushed out my cache completely, restarted, turned on the stats bar, and checked frame rates. There was hardly anyone else in the sim (The Forest), and I was getting about 2.5 to 3 FPS while standing still.

But when I moved around, the FPS numbers increased???

Moving at a fast pace through the area around my home, between, around and through a number of detail-textured buildings, my frame rate climbed as high as 9.8 FPS. But as soon as I stopped moving, it settled back down to about 3 fps again. This is strange.

I can also get a frame rate of close to 10 FPS by staring at an empty cloudless sky. Not that this is of any value...

Ceera, you're right about SL losing customers due to this - I've have already heard people say they couldn't see the point in continuing if the performance continues as it stands, and merchants are the ones that suffer the most as shopping seems to have become very difficult, what with textures on vendors not 'rezzing'. Even I've backed out of investing money in land until I see at least the performance we were getting with version 1.6.

As for the upgrades, I think it's reasonable that as technology advances, software should incorporate this, and as such expect progressively better hardware in order to run, but it's not like the technological leap from 1.6 to 1.7 is all that huge, so I don't think the problem lies with our computers so much. The fact is though, I've noticed people in many other threads with far better machines than me all reporting the same performance, so I don't believe it is worth going bankrupt to beef up your computer for a performance increase that may only be minimal.

...and yeah, 1 to 2 FPS seems to be the standard tempo for dancing at clubs now. Yuck.

Yeah. As a merchant who is just trying to get started, it really sucks. Between slow frame rates and bad texture refresh issues, shopping is a real hassle. And that translates to terrible sales figures.

I only have one little kiosk so far, and less than 20 items that I sell. My rate of sales has dropped to far less than half of what it was prior to the 1.7 release. I've released one new set of items since 1.7 came out - a set of eyes in various colors. But I'm not bothering to make anything new beyond that. Why? Because my sales have become virtually nonexistant, and because it now takes so long to add new items to my vendor that it is a major pain.

I've gone to my own vendor and tried to use it. Tried being the operative, or inoperative, word here. It worked, but was so slow that I am certain most people would only look at an item or two before getting frustrated and moving on. Some of the vendors near my own never did rez in enough to look at them. And it wasn't just mine. Every vendor I went to was a pain to use - slow and unresponsive. It's clearly one major reason why my sales are dropping off. The customers can't shop.

I've seen enough people with much higher systems complaining that I am certain this isn't just a hardware issue. I just hope the Lindens can find a way to fix it before everyone goes away in frustration.

Yet in spite of all this, I still have some faith that the Lindens WILL fix this, and that once they do, 1.7 will be worth having implemented. I don't particularly want to go back to 1.6. But I do wish they would have tested 1.7 better before they released it.