Horrible performance with good card

Hello....

I'm very new to second life and trying to get started, but I've been having horrible performance issues. I average around 8 frames per second standing still. All graphics settings are off and i'm running in an 800x600 window. also weird is that when i maximize the window to 1900x1200, the frame rate doesn't get any worse. there is also a repeated thumping noise... almost sounds like i have a mic attached to my computer and some bastard keeps tapping his thumb on it. seriously it's driving me nuts.

I have a radeon x1900 512 mb card and am used to playing games at 1900x1200 with all settings maxed. I have a single core amd 3500+ with 2 gigs of ram.

i'm assuming and hoping that this isn't how second life is supposed to run. anyways... any help would be greatly appreciated as i'd really like to explore the world with my hideous character.

SL, unlike most online products (people get real pissy around here when you call SL a game) streams all content from its servers (or, as the locals call them, sims). To overly simplify, the SL client is a viewer which lets you see what is going on in the servers. Depending on the number of avatars, running scripts, textures and the number of objects in a sim, SL will humble even top of the line video cards. I'm running with an AMD Athlon 64 +4200 X2 with 4GB system RAM and a GeForce 7800GT (256MB RAM) and crowds still lag me.

Depending on your connection speed, SL will either run smoothly or crawl. Your video card is adequate, and 2GB of system RAM is decent. If you are running with FSAA, you will get a decent hit in performance overall. Also, SL seems to work better with Nvidia based video cards. The bumping sounds you are hearing are probably some other avatar bumping into something. I could be wrong about that.

Game or Life does not matter. But the problem is Geforce Graphic cards are more liked then Radeon. The Second Life client.

I run on a 100m fiber line with 3200 amd and 3 giga of memory and 6600gt GC slt MB.But my advantage is the 100m fiber Internet line.......I stable and runs pretty much without a problem or pocketloss......

Pocketloss can be a big problem... keep an eye on those pickpockets (sorry, Usagi feeling a lil'bit giddy this morning, but I'll soon be back to my old grumpy self).
Teeny and Usagi are right, much of the lag and the low fps rate is due to server-side lag and / or a slow (DSL with only 1 or 2 MBit/sec would be slow) internet connection.

The tapping noise is your footsteps. You can turn those down or off in the preferences menu (Edit --> Preferences --> Tab "Audio & Video". There's also a slider for the wind volume; the howling wind can get very annoying too, at least in higher regions.

Also draw distance can play hell even with a fast system and video card. Drop it to 96meters and raise it when you nee it like taking pictures and such. Watch your AA and AF filter settings too, start with application controlled then increase until it adversly affects frame rate then back off some. I don't know much about the X1900 cards but as others have said, SL and ATI have long standing issues although I haven't heard about problems with the latest generation cards much.

To sum up:

1. Because the entire content of SL is dynamic it cannot be optimized like games with fixed and predictable content. So Framerates cannot be compared to other games.

2. Also because of the nature of SL, everything is streamed to your computer, so a solid and robust connection is neccesary. Wireless can be flaky, and dial-up is jut plain out.

3. SL uses the OpenGL graphics API, the same used for id's engines and others. Nvidia's OpenGL implementation is top notch, however, ATI has always had 2nd rate performance when it comes to OpenGL. It's the nature of their drivers and has been an unfortunate fact for quite a while. So ATI cards will not have the same performance as Nvidia in SL.

4. Even with the new Occlusion Culling, your overall draw distance can be a factor. Best nto to go over 128, though 96 works well for genreal use, and some people go as low as 64.

Overall, SL is very different from the games and applications you are probably familiar with. If anything, it's more like a 3D web browser. So SL's performance will be drasticly different from what you may expect.

Frame rates are determined by the slowest component, which might be the graphics card, network connection, server, processor, memory thrashing, etc.

If you resize your screen and still get the same frame rate, I think that's a very good indication that your video card is not the bottleneck. (I just upgraded video cards recently--when I resized with my old slow card the rates changed, but with the new card they don't.)

just wanted to add, SL does *not* use the features that most modern games do, it doesn't care how many pixel shaders you have etc, so the 'power' of the graphics card is only used so far as it can throw up alot of triangles per second.

The real issue is the CPU, sl is almost completely cpu bound with any graphics card made in the last several years. Memory bandwidth of your main system memory also plays a big part in performance.