Low Frames Per SecondLife Lee please save me

I just bought a brand new PC and was hoping to make some videos but SL is still too slow for me. In fact, there is no speed difference what so ever compared to my old box (the game loads way fast now but other than load time, I get identical speed with my new box!)

Where is the bottleneck? How can I find the bottleneck on my own machine? What profiling tools are available in the SL client or 3rd party to track down this problem. I'm so fed up with the slideshow effect.

What's your specs?

Yeah we've helped with several other build machine threads... but we will have to know what you have to give advice how to get where you want to be

Hey cousin LF!


AMD Athlon 64 3200+ S939
Asus K8V-X Mainboard
VIA K8T800 Chipset
VIA VT8237 South Bridge
1 Gig DDR400 Memory
160GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache Hard Drive
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB (4x agp)

I know it's not the best mobo I could have gotten but my other pc broke so I had to buy whatever the guy had in stock. I'm running 4x AGP i think with my video card, is 4x agp just to slow? ( I hacked the setup file so I could enable AGP in SL for ATi's and it didn't seem to help much)

hmm that system overall looks okay... actually fairly similar to mine.. i'd like to ask two things... first.. how many 3dmarks does it get? (this will help isolate any SL specific speed problems from general system speed problems)

i have a 3500+, same mobo, same basic ram, faster hd's and a 6800 gt video card.. and i get about 3500 3dmarks (from the 2005 version)

secondly.. i would like to ask you to go to a specific place in sl with specific settings, an see what fps you get (this may help isolate location/build related lag issues from system problems)...

if you would be so kind as to turn off local lighting, and set your draw distance to 128, go to the center of the sim Perry (two sims east of ahern, and relatively low-spec build, not much geometry, no updating objects etc).. there is an 'artist ambush' pavillion over the river in the middle of the sim... stand just to the south of it and look north so that you can see the full pavillion, some trees, and then the end of the world past that

with those settings, in that basic location... my system is able to come just shy of 70 fps in SL... yours should probably be in the mid to upper 50's

Two silly questions...

Are you using wireless networking? What's your Alt-1 "Ping User" and "Ping Sim" ingame?

Are you trying to improve framerate while recording movies, or while playing normally?

Thx Eltee, I'll check my 3dmarks and do a test in Perry tonight when I get on.

Hi Lee! - I'm not on wireless. Right now I'm just trying to improve frame rate normally. I'll check my user/sim pings tonight.

Trimda Hedges said he was going to drop by for a visit to let try his Nvidia card just to see if there is any change.

Thx for the help folks

Yeah for some ridiculous reason the networking performance is directly related to your video card... if the Sim lags, or you lag, your client slooowwssss down to maybe half of a frame a second. I imagine the effect is the same, but lessened, on slightly lower ping times.

LF

yeah because though i can get 60, sometimes up to 80 fps in perry (the sim we own >75% of and the rest is 'dead' accounts) it can still easily go down to 2-3 fps in the welcome area etc... one bad neighbor can easily cut yer frame-rate in half, or more

Eltee&Lee, I went to Parry and when I first arrived with the settings you specifed I was getting about 65fps (really good), and my ping user/ ping sim both around 100-110.

I turned up my draw distance to 512 just to see what would happen and my fps dropped to about 10 and both pings jumped to 200-300. 10 fps is ok but other places I've tried this I could drop as low as 2fps like with my old machine.

When I switched back to 128m draw distance my fps didn't go back up to what I expected (back to 65), I only got 15fps standing in the same place. I waited a few minutes and it didnt get any higher than 20 - which is pretty good but I'd expect it to go back to 65.

When I alt-tab out and back in to make SL refresh my fps does climb back to 40, but its still not the 65 I got when I first arrived. I relogged with 128m draw distance I and was I getting 65 again. I tried flying around a large area, waiting for everything to load. When I went back to the place I was standing originally I was getting 50fps.

When I try going to 64m draw distance, some of the geometry in Perry dissapears on the minimap. The only geometry I see in Perry on the minimap is within a ~64m circle around my av, but all the geometry from the surrounding sims are still visible on the minimap. Are the old objects sticking around in memory slowing things down?

If I teleported "home" and I was standing 512m away from my home location in a different sim, would all the old object unload??

Eltee&Lee, I went to Parry and when I first arrived with the settings you specifed I was getting about 65fps (really good), and my ping user/ ping sim both around 100-110.

I turned up my draw distance to 512 just to see what would happen and my fps dropped to about 10 and both pings jumped to 200-300. 10 fps is ok but other places I've tried this I could drop as low as 2fps like with my old machine.

When I switched back to 128m draw distance my fps didn't go back up to what I expected (back to 65), I only got 15fps standing in the same place. I waited a few minutes and it didnt get any higher than 20 - which is pretty good but I'd expect it to go back to 65.

When I alt-tab out and back in to make SL refresh my fps does climb back to 40, but its still not the 65 I got when I first arrived. I relogged with 128m draw distance I and was I getting 65 again. I tried flying around a large area, waiting for everything to load. When I went back to the place I was standing originally I was getting 50fps.

When I try going to 64m draw distance, some of the geometry in Perry dissapears on the minimap. The only geometry I see in Perry on the minimap is within a ~64m circle around my av, but all the geometry from the surrounding sims are still visible on the minimap. Are the old objects sticking around in memory slowing things down?

If I teleported "home" and I was standing 512m away from my home location in a different sim, would all the old object unload??

P4 3.0 running at 3.3
1GB dual-channel RAM
ASUS P4P800 Deluxe, i875 chipset, ICH5, 10% overclock, northbridge in turbo mode
GeForce FX5900 non-ultra
60% object detail, 100% tree and avatar detail, sun at zenith
Windowed mode, about 1280x1000
I think it got about 3400 3DMarks in whatever version was out late last year, 500 of which showed up after I put the northbridge in turbo mode. Go ASUS!
Serial ATA hard drive which is faster than tachyons

Local off, shadows off, aniso off, disable far clip on, shiny objects on, bump mapped & cloth, terrain detail high.

Standing at Eltee's spot with her settings, looking north, I get a little over 50FPS.

Ok so my performance seems to be in line with what other are getting.

If I still want to get better FPS, what video card/pc spec is most important to my FPS (ie, what's the bottleneck for me now)

- AGP 8x too slow? Should I get PCI-E?
- video cards texels per second rating
- memory bandwidth on video card


I'm fed up with ATI (driver and compatibility issues).

I'm looking at either a Wildcat Realizm or an Nvidia card. I hear that Nvidia will be better but it's from people who don't play SL. I have a feeling that Wildcat Realizm will let me walk around at 512m draw distance all the time...

well the odd behaviour you saw jack has to do with how SL handles 'regions of interest' to the rendering process.

Rather than occlusion culling (which usually requires alot of advanced number crunching not possible in a 'live' world like SL, the SL client instead renders areas 'active' (aka 'viewable, or 'recently viewed'). These areas will not immediately fall back to passive even when lowering the resolution, it can take alot of time, or a relog

There is no video card or computer made that could handle 512m draw with any kind of respectable framerate, there is simply too much overhead due to the live nature of SL it can't simply render the polygons, it has to continually actively refresh the information and this causes a huge amount of system over head for 'updating' things etc...

an interesting compromise is the relatively recent setting 'disable far clipping'... this often will render known 'static' objects (things that have been in place a long time and do not need to be constantly updated) out to about 2x the current draw distance. This has some impact on framerate, but fairly minimal, while 'expanding' the world past your normal 'range' rather significantly.

aka it won't ask the servers to keep updating things that far away, but if they are in the cache, it will draw them even if they aren't within the normal range.

As to the cards, don't waste your money on a professional openGL card.. they are designed very very specifically to aid in line acceleration and extreme resolution workstations, and have drivers that reflect that, many of them will not work with many games, or will return game performance significantly lower than modern consumer cards (because by in large they are not meant to carry much texture overhead or do much shader work, unlike consumer cards which are designed by in large specifically to accelerate the texturing and pixel shading process.


i would reccomend however a nvidia 6800 series of cards (probably 6800gt as the ultras are still very overpriced and hard to find). They will give you the best SL performance at the moment. 512 meg cards might prove to be an advantage for SL in the future, but only if/when LL opens newview to take advantage of them, and since GETTING all that data into the card will still be a rather bottlenecky process (and the more thats in the card the more will need to be updated per frame) it may be a sort fo two edged sword, boosting the texturing and geometry performance, but bogging down even more with updates.

On the subject of professional vs gaming video cards, AnandTech has a very telling review here: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2307. Be sure to check out both the Doom3/HL2 benchmarks and the various CAD/rendering benchmarks.