Laptop Lag

I just bought a new Compaq Presario V2000 laptop (also called the ML-28 or VS2311US).

64bit AMD Turion processor, 512meg RAM (128 of which is shared by ATI video card).

System runs Unreal 2004 like a whiz. Superb graphics, no glitches or jitters.

Second Life runs like a lag fiend.

I thought maybe with the shared memory, I was lacking some ram so I slammed another 256 meg in there. No difference.

Talked with a friend who said his wife's Gateway runs SL just fine. But on my system, SL lags like Sim FPS is 1.

Anyone have any ideas as to what might be going on?

What's your FPS in SL? What video drivers are you running?

SimFPS is running an average of 150-240.

Video driver is: ATI Radeon Express 200M using ati2dvag.dll and ati2mtag.sys driver.

Don't have any problems with my desktop. It's the laptop that lags on SL... and it should be running like greased lightning I'd think.

Oh, and HI CATHERINE! How ya been? Good to hear from you.

No, Client FPS. Sim FPS doesn't have anything to do with your video card, and the numbers are basically meaningless anyway.

Are you actually able to run on your laptop okay, or are there problems beyond rendering speed?

Way:

You might want to check some of my other posts on other forum threads regarding hardware and systems resources as they relate to this unbelievable resource hog aka Second Life.

Without repeating myself, laptops in general are going to have a variety of issues and performance problems with SL. Bottom line, I run a huge Big Mac G5 desktop, fully loaded and my SL experience is wonderful, even with some graphics options on, such as Local Lighting, etc...

Of course, regardless of your computing resources on the user/client side, we are all at the mercy of SL's well known grid, server, and load issues.

Take care and see you in world soon, I hope.

E.

Well, I found out what the problem was, and I'll pass the info along.

Despite the fact that the Compaq uses a "Turion 64 bit" microprocessor... apparently it runs at bascially the speed of a Celeron. I ran a heavy-duty benchmark test on the system and it clocked in at roughly the processing power and speed of a Celeron chip. I don't know the tech end deeply enough these days to understand the why's and wherefore's, but my saavy-sense tells me the Turion is a "catch the 64 bit craze" cheap chip that users will want to steer far away from.

Basically, the benchmark showed that the laptop was running at roughly half the rate of my desktop system-- thus the extreme lag.

Just as a note though (and like Elror stated)... it amazes me that the laptop could run Unreal 2004 (a very graphics/system resource intensive program) just fine-- but bogged down on SL. I have to wonder what it is in SLs coding that would require that kind of system resource use. First impression: the entire SL system needs to be restructured and re-written from the ground up. Maybe that's what the Havok2 thing is (dunno, not my field) but for sure, something needs to be done. There's no reason SL should bog down client side more than a full-bore Unreal game with 30 monsters coming at me all at once. LOL

As far as I know, the main issue with rendering complex scenes in 3D programs is figuring out what we call the "visibility set", which is the set of polygons that are partially or fully visible from the camera's current position and view direction.

Games like Unreal and Quake can make use of algorithms that depend on an almost completely static environment (in terms of structures) to precompute large chunks of the visibility set from various places.

A dynamic environment like SL, however, must figure out the visibility set in realtime. Not only does the visibility set change as content changes, it also changes as content is streamed to the client.

In addition to this, the "content" in a game like Unreal is optimized by level designers who must continuously balance complexity with rendering speed. These level designers get very good at what they do, and they have at their disposal professional artists for texture detail, and sophisticated tools to measure the impact of changes.

- Jon

you didn't mention in your post but something that lags me while on my laptop playing SL is my wireless connection. If the data rate drops, which it does frequently with my ISP, then I get hellacious lag as well.

Yeah, I was hard-wired in to a 4.5 mbps cable system. No speed loss there.

I took the laptop back today. Another salesman, a little more saavy, took a look at my benchmark specs and said, "Yeah, looks like a 64 bit Celeron." LOL

So folks, beware the new "64 bit Turion" chips-- and there are bound to be a whole flock of them hit the market any day now. Basically Celeron power in a 64 bit form, and will NOT work with SL.

I'm not very well acqainted with 3d rendering technology. But from what I understand, the main speed gain from games such as Unreal is implementation of "Static Meshes"... ie, devices that are created in whole, loaded into the game and rendered as one object rather than a colleciton of multiple prims (that's probably a simplistic explanation, but...)

It's pretty much recognized that the Havok system isn't too spiffy, which is why LL is going to Havok2. But in addition to that, I would guess there are a whole lot of internal routines in Second Life that are not optimized and need to be totally re-written. A good indicator of this is the fact that the system appears to give *texture rendering* top priority over avatar movement. This causes lag every time you enter an area with new textures.

The logical concept would be to instantly show all un-rendered textures as various shades of gray (the system *kinda* does this now, although poorly), give avatar movement absolute top priority, and render texture details in the background as processing time allows.

Same for inventory management. It should NEVER lag an avatar to make an inventory search. The whole streaming inventory system is a bolluxed, lag-inducing fiend that likely needs redesigned from the ground up. (I've had some pretty high-level scripters and data base professionals confirm that opinion).

I agree with some other comments that I've heard: that Second Life started out as a neat experiment and quickly grew beyond the bounds of its original intent-- and the basic code and coders just haven't caught up yet. Which means that what they need to do is stop giving attention to all these new "gizmos" such as movies and customized names and other pretty lights-- and work on getting the basic drivers and routines up to snuff. At this point there should be no teleport problems, no logon problems, and the lag monster should be on its last legs.